Tunisia’s political system is still compromised, but the economy is showing some signs of minimal recovery. However, one area that is contributing to the inability of decision makers to react to changes and challenges in the economy is the time it takes for economic data to be released. For example, it is only now, May 2024, that we learned that banks showed cumulative profits of 1.474 billion dinars in 2023, compared to 1.263 billion in 2022.
The data does not include STB, CitiBank, BFPME and BTL, which strangely have not yet published their results. While the news is positive, with banks showing double-digit growth in profits, the fact that it took months to generate partial data is a big problem for business operators and policy makers.
Likewise, the government only announced recently that the state budget managed a surplus of 1.3 billion dinars at the end of 2023, down from 1.4 billion dinars at the end of March 2023. Again these figures released months after the fiscal period ended is indicative of a poorly tracked economy.
