Shows slight recovery in August

Mozambique’s Economic Climate Indicator (ICE) registered a slight recovery in August, the National Statistics Institute (INE) has announced. “The economic climate indicator (ICE) recovered slightly, interrupting the downward trend that it had been registering since February,” the INE bulletin reads. This “slight recovery” incorporates a positive contribution from the employment and demand perspectives, “which increased substantially in the same month”. In July, the index dropped to 74 points, the lowest since 2004 (as opposed to the high point with 104.1 points in February 2015). In August, the ICE rose to 75.9 points. “By sector, the slight increase in ICE was due to the favourable situation in the industrial production, transport, construction and other non-financial services sectors, which compensated for the unfavourable situation of entrepreneurs surveyed in the other sectors during the period under analysis,” the INE bulletin reads.

The rise of the ICE occurred in the same month that the Mozambican government began to ease the restrictions imposed to prevent the Covid-19 pandemic. The Confidence and Economic Climate indicators are a monthly publication on the economic situation in Mozambique, compiled from an economic survey carried out every month by INE among companies from non-financial sectors. The study expresses the opinion of economic agents about the evolution and perspective of their activity, particularly concerning employment, demand, orders, prices, production, sales and constraints, the INE explains. Mozambique had by Thursday recorded an accumulated total of 8,888 cases of infection with the new coronavirus, with 62 Covid-related deaths and 5,573 accounted officially recovered.