Angola's oil-price collapse and the kwanza's slide

Angola's economy and government revenue are overwhelmingly tied to oil, which has historically supplied around 95% of export earnings, so when global oil prices collapsed from mid-2014, the shock hit almost every part of the economy simultaneously. Angola's real GDP fell from an estimated 126 billion dollars in 2014 to around 102 billion dollars in 2015, roughly a 19% decline, as oil revenue cratered and the government cut spending sharply to narrow the resulting fiscal gap. The Banco Nacional de Angola allowed, and at times engineered, a series of kwanza devaluations rather than defend an increasingly unsustainable peg, with the currency losing around 35% of its value against the dollar in 2015 alone and the official rate falling a further 60% between January 2015 and April 2016. A wide gap opened between the official exchange rate and the informal parallel-market rate, at times roughly 430 kwanzas to the dollar versus a much stronger official quote, reflecting persistent dollar scarcity. Inflation, which had been in single digits before the shock, climbed to around 42% by the end of 2016 as imported-goods costs rose with the weaker currency, and Angola's economy went on to contract for several consecutive years after 2016.