South Africa back to Africa's biggest economy

São Paulo - South Africa came to be, at least for now, the largest economy on the African continent, according to the úlltimos figures of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The leadership was in Nigeria, raised to the post two years ago after a statistical review shows that GDP was almost twice higher than previously thought.

The third place is now Egypt, who came to take second for a brief period, as estimated by KPMG.

The latest estimates put the GDP of South Africa US $ 301 billion, Nigeria's US $ 296 billion and Egypt with $ 270 billion.

The main responsibility for the excess is the recent strength of the South African rand, which appreciated 15% in just the past three months.

The process also happened with other currencies of emerging, especially our real, driven by international liquidity in a scenario of uncertainty in Europe and postponement of higher interest rates in the United States.

Nigerian naira was an exception and has lost much value since mid-2014 when it began to fall the price of oil, the main export product of the country.

The country has come to establish fixed exchange rate for 16 months, but returned to release the quote about a month - which led to a new fall.

Scenario

Exchange rate movements can change those calculations from one day to the other, but what matters for the long term is growth.

And unfortunately, in this regard none of the countries at the top of the rankings can breathe quiet.

Nigeria and South Africa had GDP fall in the first quarter and just another negative result to set up a technical recession. In the case of Nigeria, it's hard to imagine a recovery with oil as depreciated.

GDP per capita South African is still much higher than the Egyptian or Nigerian, but the forecast is that with growing population and stop activity, complete it in 2017 four consecutive years of decline.

Political uncertainty is also weighing: at the end of last year, South Africa came to have three different finance ministers in the space of one week.

One is in four South Africans unemployed, but their infrastructure and business environment are known to be better than their peers.

And unlike them (and Brazil), the country also has investment grade (at least for now).