2019 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Zimbabwe
This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix analyzes recent trends in poverty and social indicators for Zimbabwe. It discusses land reform, agricultural policies, and the outcomes. The paper presents background information on the evolution of inflation and money aggregates in Zimbabwe. It analyzes the demand of money since the late 1990s, and discusses factors that can lead to diverging paths of inflation and money growth in the short term. The paper also analyzes Zimbabwe’s export performance in recent years, and identifies the factors that could improve export performance, from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective.
Agriculture is an important sector of the Zimbabwean economy. At independence, land ownership was highly skewed, as the sector was dominated by a few commercial farms. The initial phases of land reform, along with liberalization of the agricultural sector throughout the 1990s, helped to increase Zimbabwe’s agricultural productivity, but these gains have been reversed over the past few years. After the bumper crop season of 1999/2000, yields have plummeted, owing to droughts and the disruption of commercial farming under the Fast-Track Land Reform Program. The future of the sector is largely dependent on the success of resettled farmers, which requires better weather conditions, the availability of inputs and capital, and a stable economic environment. Preliminary data for the 2002/03 crop season indicate that, for many of Zimbabwe’s main crops, production continues to be low.