BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, April 10 (Xinhua) -- Brunei managed to skirt an economic contraction last year amid grim estimates from multilateral institutions.
The Department of Economic Planning and Development (JPKE) on Wednesday released Q4 2018 data for the sultanate's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which showed Brunei's economy grew by a rounded up 0.1 percent last year.
Computations based on data presented by JPKE showed that real GDP for the year totalled 18.39 billion Brunei dollars (13.59 billion U.S. dollars).
This came after the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank estimated the country's 2018 economy to have contracted by 2 percent and 1 percent respectively.
The country's GDP for the fourth quarter of last year saw an increase of 1 percent at 4.78 billion Brunei dollars from 4.74 billion Brunei dollars in the same period in 2017.
The oil and gas sector contracted by 3.3 percent in the period with a reported value of 2.70 billion Brunei dollars from 2.80 billion Brunei dollars in Q4 2017.
"The decline was mainly associated with the decrease of the manufacture of liquefied natural gas and methanol by 6.3 percent and oil and gas mining by 2.3 percent," said JPKE.
JPKE added that crude oil production also decreased from 118.1 thousand barrel per day in Q4 2017 to 117.6 thousand barrel per day in Q4 2018.
