War-torn South Sudan is predicted to have the fastest growing economy this year at 24.3%. As South Africa’s moribund economy continues to limp along, war-torn South Sudan has been listed as the world’s fastest-growing economy in 2025, according to data storytelling platform Voronoi. However, there’s a caveat.
Voronoi’s extrapolation appears to be completely inaccurate. IOL probed the recent blog post and determined that Voronoi referenced the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) Latest World Economic Outlook publication. It extrapolated the data to predict that South Sudan’s growth will land at 24.3% this year.
However, the actual World Economic Outlook does notdistinguish betweenSouth Sudan and Sudan. Moreover, a close look at the figures shows that Sudan had a negative 24.3% growth in 2024. The same percentage as the one Voronoi has – just totally reversed.
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And, if you Google “what country is expected to have the fastest growing economy 2025,” the Voronoi data comes up. Sudan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is projected to grow by 9.5% in 2025, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. Voronoi is a mobile platform for data storytelling, created by the team behind Visual Capitalist, which itself analyses data.
FocusEconomics.com stated that South Sudan is expected to grow at 17.8% next year. “But while the projection looks impressive, it is the result of a highly favourable base of comparison; the economy shrank 26% in 2024 due to spillovers from the war in neighbouring Sudan,” it said.
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