Cairo tells S&P it will grow faster next year than the IMF expects it to grow at all

Ahmed Rostom, Egypt’s minister of planning, told representatives of S&P Global Ratings and other international institutions on 26 September that Egypt is targeting growth of 5.2% to 5.4% in the coming fiscal year, resting on private-sector empowerment, an improved investment climate and job creation, Daily News Egypt reported. The meeting formed part of the periodic review of Egypt’s credit rating. Rostom said GDP grew 5.1% in FY2025/26, up from 4.4% the year before, led by manufacturing and telecoms and IT, and that unemployment fell to 5.8% in the second quarter of 2026. The 5.1% outturn is corroborated: EnterpriseAM reported the same figure on 11 September, noting it beat the IMF’s 4.6% forecast while falling marginally below the EBRD’s 5.3% projection from its June Regional Economic Prospects report.

The forward number is where the arithmetic parts company with the Fund. The IMF’s Seventh Review press release of 30 July put FY2025/26 growth at about 4.6% and said war effects would moderate growth to 4.4% in FY2026/27 — roughly a full percentage point below what Rostom has now promised a rating agency. The quarterly trend runs the same way: EnterpriseAM records fourth-quarter growth at 4.7%, easing from 5.0% in the third. The Fund’s own assessment is not uniformly warm. Its September Country Focus piece by Amine Mati and Yevgeniya Korniyenko credits a flexible exchange rate, macro buffers and a swift policy response for absorbing war spillovers, but says more decisive reform implementation is needed. The July review language is blunter: “Progress on structural reforms has been uneven.” Headline inflation, having fallen steadily to March, rose to 15.2%, about 1.4 percentage points above expectation, and the Fund expects 16.7% in the second half of 2026.

Assessment: This is not a data release and should not be read as one. It is a sovereign talking its book during a live rating review, and the number that matters is the one nobody else has printed. The 5.1% outturn is real and independently reported; the 5.2–5.4% target is single-sourced to the pitch itself and points uphill while quarterly growth walks downhill. Watch what S&P does rather than what Cairo says. The harder clock is the programme: the Fund’s arrangement is widely reported to expire in December 2026, which turns the successor question — new arrangement, Gulf deposits, or both, and on what terms — into next quarter’s real story.