Files
Abstract
During the 1980s, most African countries implemented major policy reforms and
economic adjustments designed to address the long term imbalances between domestic
demand and supply, a cause of growing external deficits and of slowing of economic growth.
Domestic policies are blamed as a major cause of these imbalances. In the late 1970s, as
economic difficulties grew in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, countries were unsuccessful in
obtaining external financial support essential to restore economic growth. With growing
constraints on the availability of capital, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank made loans contingent, to a large extent, on a set of macroeconomic policy
reforms aimed at increasing productive capacity.
The objective of this paper is to evaluate changes in the key economic indicators and
establish both quantitative and qualitative relationships between performance indicators and
policies. The main focus is on macroeconomic and agricultural policies. A brief overview
of Zimbabwe's economic situation in the early 1980s and the basis for policy change is
given. Then, an evaluation of overall economic and agricultural response to policy changes
is presented. The analysis is based on a simple growth model with internal investment and
exports as endogenous variables. The analysis of the agricultural sector policy response is
based on establishing a qualitative relationship between policy variables and performance.
While data are insufficient to estimate a full-scale structural model of Zimbabwe's economy,
the results can be useful in establishing the fundamental causal relationships between
economic indicators and macroeconomic policies.