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.
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