SYRIA TODAY

Syria today

--Dr.Debesh Bhowmik

According to 2011,Syria’s GDP is estimated as $64.7 billion  and per capita GDP is $5,100 .The GDP growth rate declined by more than 20%. The sectoral contribution of GDP in Agriculture showed 16.9%,in industry it was 27.4% and the service sector constituted 55.7% respectively.The economy faces high rates of inflation which is 30% and the  population below the poverty line  is 12% including high rate of unemployment of 12.3% . Its industrial areas are petroleum, textiles, food processing, beverages, tobacco, phosphate rock mining, cement, oil seeds crushing, car assembly etc.Syria exports namely crude oil, minerals, petroleum products, fruits and vegetables, cotton fiber, clothing, meat and live animals, wheat respectively whose main destinations are as follows, Iraq (55.9%), Saudi Arabia( 9.3%), Kuwait( 6.1%), United Arab Emirates (5.3%), Lebanon (4.2%).It exports generally machinery and transport equipment, electric power machinery, food and livestock, metal and metal products, chemicals and chemical products, plastics, yarn, paper etc whose main destinations are Saudi Arabia (21.2%), United Arab Emirates( 10.4%), Iran( 7.7%), China( 7.0%), Iraq( 6.3%), Ukraine( 6.3%), Egypt( 4.3% ) respectively. Its balance of trade deficit appears as 1.15 billion US $ in 2011. The gross external debt of Syria stood $8.006 billion as on 31 December 2011 in which its public debt became 34.4% of GDP .

The economy of Syria is based on agriculture, oil, industry and services. Its GDP per capita expanded 80% in the 1960s reaching a peak of 336% of total growth during the 1970s. This proved unsustainable for Syria and the economy shrank by 33% during the 1980s. However the GDP per capita registered a very modest total growth of 12% (1.1% per year on average) during the 1990s due to successful diversification. More recently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected real GDP growth at 3.9% in 2009 from close to 6% in 2008. The two main pillars of the Syrian economy used to be agriculture and oil, which together accounted for about one-half of GDP. Agriculture, for instance, accounted for about 25% of GDP and employed 25% of the total labor force. However, poor climatic conditions and severe drought badly affected the agricultural sector, thus reducing its share in the economy to about 17% of 2008 GDP, down from 20.4% in 2007, according to preliminary data from the Central Bureau of Statistics. On the other hand, higher crude oil prices countered declining oil production and led to higher budgetary and export receipts.

Since the out break of the Syrian civil war, the Syrian economy has been hit by massive economic sanctions restricting trade with the Arab League, Australia, Canada, the European Union, (as well as the European countries of Albania, Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, and Switzerland), Georgia, Japan, Turkey, and the United States. These sanctions and the instability associated with the civil war have reversed previous growth in the Syrian economy to a state of decline for the years 2011 and 2012.

In this circumstances, the impact of chemical weapons used by the Syrian government which killed more than thousands of people including innocent children brought about UN intervention in Syria and it creates the possibility US attack on Syria which diverged the world politics in two poles  forgetting the Syrian crimes. However, the oil crisis begins  and provocates to hike the prices of crude oils and the international political situation became tensed damaging Syrian economy.