Very weird discrepancy in the somali economy

[Midas]

@Idilinaa @Barkhadle1520

I think you guys might be intrested in this . I was looking at this report info from the official govt statsics twitter. If you look at the the government expenditure vs the household final expenditure the gap is honestly insane. Its $980 million for the govt and $15 billion for the household.
To out that into perspective the gap for Kenya is 12 billion for the government expenditure and 80 billion for the household. That a 1 to 6 ratio . Ours is a 1 to 17 ratio

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Somalia National Bureau of Statistics has released its first Policy Brief, providing policymakers &amp; stakeholders with practical, data-driven insights drawn from the 2024 GDP report.<br><br>This marks a new chapter in evidence-based decision-making, with forward-looking recommendations… <a href="https://t.co/DCQz2H6Rm2">pic.twitter.com/DCQz2H6Rm2</a></p>&mdash; Somalia National Bureau of Statistics (@NBS_Somalia) <a href="">July 28, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Midas]

1) I think this confirms how much larger the economy is than the statsics tell us if these households are somehow consuming $15 billion dollars in goods and services.

2) it shows how our economic growth isnt at all influence by govt spending which i dont think is the case with other african countries

 

[Idilinaa]

Good observation, that ratio shows you two things. First, the economy is way bigger than what the official stats say, with a massive informal economy. And second, GDP growth here is clearly private-sector driven rather than state-driven. Even the $15 billion figure, as big as it looks, is still under-reported , it’s probably 2–3 times higher in reality.

It also shows Somalia isn’t actually foreign aid dependent. Most donor money or aid flows through the government budget or international orgs, but most of the real economic activity comes from households’ own income, business/trade, and investments from the diaspora.

So the economy is largely self-sustaining, independent of government spending or foreign aid.

I clocked another weird discrepancy when I was following debates about Trump’s tariffs like when he pointed out that a country like Lesotho exports way more to the US than it imports, and framed it as unfair. But really, that’s just because they’re a poor country. Then I thought back to how people always cite Somalia’s import numbers for different goods as proof of “dependency.”

But a poor country with weak purchasing power can’t import that much. The problem is they don’t have accurate domestic production data to compare it against, so they assume there’s an outsized import dependency. In reality, those import numbers are more of an indirect admission of how much domestic production is happening and how much wealth actually exists in the economy. At the end of the day, a country can only import what it can pay for.