Growth of 2.3 percent, 58,200 fewer people in work, and the best investment forecast since 2020
Tunisia's statistics institute published two quarterly releases on 15 August: GDP up 2.3 percent over a year, unemployment down from 15 percent to 14.9, and 58,200 fewer people in work. Nobody disputes those figures. One reading makes the quarter a real but fragile recovery, another calls the fall in unemployment fictitious because 77,500 people also left the labour force, and manufacturers in a survey by the same institute report their highest investment intentions in six years.
Where they agree
Chkoundali and African Manager reach the same place from the same sectoral figures: the quarter was carried by agriculture and by services, and not by industry, which barely moved while mining and chemicals fell. Both call that base fragile, because a farming season cannot be repeated to order.
Where they split
Chkoundali reads the 58,200 as jobs destroyed and the lower rate as the arithmetic of a shrinking labour force. The institute prints both movements and gives no cause for either, and African Manager's analysis leaves the labour market aside altogether. The survey then splits the two analysts: African Manager holds the manufacturers' forecast record good enough to take the 26 points seriously, while Chkoundali expects those same intentions to arrive as imported machinery paid for in foreign currency.
What nobody is saying
Nobody puts a number on where the 77,500 people who left the labour force in three months went. Chkoundali names discouragement and migrant boats and counts neither, and the institute, which ran the survey, publishes no breakdown of the fall.
Unemployment is 14.9 percent, with 622,400 unemployed against 641,700 three months earlier, while the number of people in work falls from 3,626,300 to 3,568,100 and the labour force by 77,500, to 4,190,500. The activity rate loses 1.2 points, to 44.7 percent of those aged 15 and over, and graduate unemployment rises from 24.2 percent to 26.6. The release gives no cause for any of it.
”Le taux de chômage a ainsi diminué à 14,9 %, contre 15 % au trimestre précédent.”The unemployment rate has thus fallen to 14.9 percent, against 15 percent in the previous quarter.
He reads the lower rate as arithmetic rather than a return to work: the economy shed 58,200 jobs in three months while 77,500 people left the labour force, which shrinks the base the rate is calculated on. He puts that exit down to discouraged jobseekers and to people leaving on migrant boats, and reads graduate unemployment, up from 24.0 percent a year earlier to 26.6, as proof of growth that punishes skills. The investment intentions do not reassure him: local integration is too weak, so a new project imports its machinery and half-finished inputs and pays for them in foreign currency. He calls the quarter a consumption economy carried by agriculture, resting on seasonal and fragile bases while its industrial engines collapse.
The site takes the figure as real and finds two disappointments in it. It falls well short of the 3.3 percent the 2026 budget assumes, and it is the third quarter in a row of slowing, after 3.4 percent in the third quarter of 2025. Domestic demand adds 3.6 points to the growth while foreign trade takes 1.3 away, because imports rose 11.2 percent against 10.4 percent for exports. The extra value added is sectoral: agriculture rises 5.5 percent and supplies 22 percent of the quarter's growth on its own, while manufacturing adds 0.9 percent, mining falls 9.6 percent and chemicals 7 percent.
”La croissance ne s'autofinance pas, elle puise dans les réserves de change.”The growth does not finance itself, it draws on the foreign exchange reserves.
They put the investment opinion balance at 24 points for the first half of 2026, against 21 for the second half of 2025. The balance is the gap between managers reporting more investment and managers reporting less, so it registers a direction of opinion and not an amount. For the second half of 2026 they expect 26 points, the highest forecast in the series since 2020 and one point under the 27 that firms forecast for the first half of 2020, when the pandemic drove that half-year's outturn to minus 3. Across thirteen half-years of the series the outturn has beaten the forecast eight times, which is the ground for reading the 26 as more than optimism.