Egypt has surpassed South Africa as the second largest economy in Africa, according to Christian Viljoen, an economist at the auditing and advisory firm KPMG South Africa. Viljoen reached this conclusion by analyzing the latest figures released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its World Economic Outlook report, released in April. Ever since Nigeria rebased its gross domestic product (GDP) data in 2014, South Africa has been considered the continent’s second largest economy. But according to the new IMF statistics, South Africa’s slowing economic growth, together with the depreciation of its currency, the rand, has led to a decline in the US dollar value of the economy in the period from 2012 to 2015. The country’s currency was depreciated by as much as 50 percent, which resulted in an average decline of the nominal US dollar value of South Africa’s GDP of almost 7 percent per year between 2012 and 2015. In the same period, Egypt’s nominal US dollar GDP increased by an average of 7.5 percent per year. Comparing the depreciation of both the South African and Egyptian currencies during this period showed that the pound was devalued…
