Tourism, construction, communications most likely to grow in Oman: NCSI

Energy Tuesday 25/July/2017 20:40 PM
By: Times News Service
Tourism, construction, communications most likely to grow in Oman: NCSI

Muscat: Oman is likely to pour future investments into tourism, construction, and digital communications.
In a study called “The future of investment and growth” focused on the fiscal years 1998-2015, the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) found that the most favoured sectors for future investment are transformative manufacture, tourism, and wholesale.
Non-oil based activities dropped as a percentage of adjusted GDP, as compared to logistics, transport, storage, and communications.
These sections of the economy leapt greatly in the past few years, increasing their promise for potential investment.
The report said that the construction sector “quadrupled in between 1998 and 2015 at a yearly rate of 12.6 per cent. The greatest periods of growth had been between 2001 and 2003, at 84 per cent, as well as between 2006 and 2008, at 123 per cent.
Greatest indicator
“The greatest indicator for this sector’s growth is the year 2009. NCSI added, “Even directly after the global financial crisis, construction still rose by 15 per cent.”
Transport, storage and communications “rose by around 600 per cent in the same period, jumping from OMR184 million to OMR1.7 billion. In the year 2009, it shrunk by around one per cent, after which it rose from 2010 to 2015 by an average of 6.9 per cent”.
Within non-oil based manufacture, transformative manufacture has been the greatest grower, according to the NCSI. The report said, “Transformative manufacture grew at 661.9 per cent between 1998 and 2015.
Adjusted GDP rose from OMR0.3 billion to OMR2.6 billion in the same period. It persevered remarkably well in the face of global instability, and even grew consistently in the infamous years 2008 and 2009.
“In 2011, mining for non-metallic materials rose upwards of 49 per cent, followed by chemical industries, plastic and glass.”
Tourism saw a rise of “17.7 per cent in 2015, with 2.6 million tourists spending over OMR288.2 million,” while analysis of the previous years showed a distinct upward trend, “from a yearly average of 125 million per year between 1998-2008 to 199 million between 2009-2015.”
Lastly, exports grew, “by a factor of 10 in the period between 1998 and 2014, from OMR2.1 billion to OMR20.5 billion. However, imports grew at a natural rate, going from 2.2 billion to 11.9 billion”.