Moldova’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth is expected to accelerate to 3.8% in 2026, the European lender said.
The country’s economic growth slows to 0.1% in 2024 from 0.7% in 2023, driven by an 18.9% decline in agriculture and a 12.6% drop in real exports due to lower demand in the EU and Ukraine, EBRD analysts argued in their forecast.
“Production and exports remained sluggish in early 2025, also hampered by disruptions to gas supplies from Russia’s Gazprom to the unrecognized separatist region of Transnistria and the interruption of electricity supplies from its thermal power plant, which required costly electricity imports from Romania. As a result, retail electricity and heating prices rose by 50 and 25 percent in January 2025, respectively. This occurred against a backdrop of already accelerating inflation in late 2024 due to rising food prices and a planned gradual adjustment of excise duty prices in early 2025, prompting the central bank to raise the discount rate twice in early 2025, the first increase in more than two years,” the European lender explained.
Recall that earlier, the IMF (down to 0.6%) and the World Bank (down to 0.9%) strongly lowered their forecasts for Moldova’s economic growth in 2025. The Ministry of Economy made its own prediction – the economy will grow by 2%.
In the Eastern Europe and Caucasus region, which includes Moldova, the EBRD predicts that economic growth will slow to 3.5% in 2025 from 3.8% last year, reflecting external vulnerabilities and regional instability. That forecast was down 0.1% from the lender’s February forecast. Growth prospects for the region are estimated at 4.3% in 2026.
