Page 10 - Economic transformation

in 1968.Two issues therefore arise from this trend. The first is that the country’s

population growth rate has almost halved since 1988 when it was estimated at 5.1 percent.

That said, its current estimated level of 2.9 percent remains higher than the African

average growth rate (although it is the lowest population growth rate the country has

registered in the last 32 years) as illustrated by Figure 6 below.

Figure 6: Gambia, Guinea, Lesotho and Senegal population growth rates (1960
to 2017)

Globally, the GDP per capita is accepted as a ‘naïve’ measure of prosperity of

economies. This is because it is a metric that estimates a country's economic output per

person by dividing the GDP of a country by its population. In general, the higher the rate

of change of per capita GDP, the faster the rate at which the productivity per worker in

the economy is rising. Among the necessary things for this to happen, the average per

capita GDP growth has to be higher than the population’s growth rate. A case in which

the average population growth rate is greater than the average per capita growth rate

suggests that although the economy is growing, its growth is not resulting in any net

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