Brunei's economy slips further 2.5 percent in 2016

Brunei's economy posted a 2.5 percent year-on-year decline in 2016, owing to a slowdown in the oil and gas sector, said the latest statistics released Thursday by the Department of Economic Planning and Development (JPKE) of the Prime Minister's Office.

For the whole year of 2016, the annual Gross Domestic Product of Brunei was valued at 18.14 billion Brunei dollars (13.01 billion U.S. dollars) at constant prices, a decline of 2.5 percent compared to 18.60 billion Brunei dollars in 2015.

According to JPKE, the decline was due to a 6.1 percent year-on-year drop of the oil and gas sector in 2016. In addition, the non-oil and gas sector also declined by 0.3 percent.

This is a further decline from the 0.6 percent contraction recorded in 2015 and 2.3 percent, 1.8 percent contraction recorded in 2014 and 2013 respectively.

For the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, JPKE said that Brunei's GDP at constant prices droped 3.6 percent to 4.505 billion Brunei dollars, compared to 4.673 billion Brunei dollars in the same period last year.

GDP is a monetary measure of the value of all final goods and services produced in a period of time, which is commonly used to roughly determine the economic performance of a whole country or region, and to make international comparisons. Endit