A disturbing lack of realism in economic targets

IT seems a few eyebrows were raised earlier this week when the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) announced an export growth target range for this year of between 6.6 percent and 8.8 percent, and immediately followed up that piece of news with an opinion that exports would “go beyond forecasted figures,” and expand by as much as nine percent.

This would not have seemed so unrealistic, had the forecast not been made within days of the final report on 2015 export figures, which showed an overall decline of 2.4 percent from the year before. Nor would the DTI figures have seemed so out of place had they not come after a downward adjustment in targets by the interagency Development Budget Coordinating Committee (DBCC), which trimmed the export growth goal to five percent from an earlier target of six percent for 2016.