Page 16 - Economic transformation

cropping industry which fell from accounting for 16 percent of the GDP in 2012 to 9

percent in 2017 and the simultaneous rise in significance of the construction industry

which more than doubled its contribution to the economy.

It is important to point out that a decline in an industry’s contribution to GDP

does not necessarily mean that a sector has shrunk in size (but rather that its size is

growing at a progressively slower rate annually). It is this chapter’s proposal that, at the

minimum, the rate at which the Crop industry shrunk in The Gambia between 2010 and

2017 most likely led to price shocks. The proposal is that this situation was further

worsened by a construction industry whose contribution to GDP more than doubled in 3

years. The fact that the construction industry demands a lot of imported inputs and

services, the chapter proposes, contributed inflationary pressure on the economy (See

Figure 12 below)

Figure 12: How the shift in GDP sectoral composition drove inflation

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