The International Monetary Fund said it expects OPEC and its partners to start increasing oil output gradually from July, “a transition that’s set to catapult Saudi Arabia back into the ranks of the world’s fastest-growing economies next year,” according to a report in Bloomberg.
“We are assuming the full reversal of cuts is happening at the beginning of 2025,” Amine Mati, the lender’s mission chief to the kingdom, said in an interview with Bloomberg in Washington, where the IMF and the World Bank are holding their spring meetings.
The view explains why the IMF is turning more upbeat on Saudi Arabia, whose economy contracted last year as it led the OPEC+ alliance alongside Russia in production cuts that squeezed supplies and pushed up crude prices. In 2022, record crude output propelled Saudi Arabia to the fastest expansion in the Group of 20.