#ZimAt40 Beginnings Thread
The economy did boom in the first five years, thanks to the removal of sanctions and the creative use of the old marketing boards that now moved into the communal lands.
The economy did boom in the first five years, thanks to the removal of sanctions and the creative use of the old marketing boards that now moved into the communal lands.
But there were a number of very severe stresses and problems that were not addressed.
First Zimbabwe had inherited Ian Smith’s tightly controlled economy with every dollar of export earnings assigned to an import by central authority.
First Zimbabwe had inherited Ian Smith’s tightly controlled economy with every dollar of export earnings assigned to an import by central authority.
Although it had high levels of private ownership, this was largely crony capitalism, you had to be white before 1980 and connected afterwards.
In many ways it was more like the Eastern European economies with the virtues and vices. The virtue was the high growth rates for a quarter century as tight controls on imports crated huge captive markets...
...followed by the stagnation because of totally inadequate recapitalisation and businesses expected to perform economic miracles with 20yr-old plus machinery. Reforms came a decade later with ESAP, which rapidly became and import led boom followed by the hyperinflation collapse,
...Followed by the deindustrialisation of the US dollar era. Again a lost chance to start switching early and building something new in the early 1980s while there was still time.
Secondly a lot of growth was built on subsidy, big wide-ranging subsidies to ensure farmers were paid well (and the big commercial farmers were the biggest winners) but consumers paid very little. That broke budgets and instead of tightening subsidies to...
....to make them pro-poor instead of pro everyone with the rich really winning, the corrections were never implemented.
But there was some social good
Everyone talks about education but this was, seriously, the most obvious and spectacular gain after the actual arrival of democracy itself. Rhodesia Front policy had been supportive of universal primary education...
Everyone talks about education but this was, seriously, the most obvious and spectacular gain after the actual arrival of democracy itself. Rhodesia Front policy had been supportive of universal primary education...
...the actual RF ideologues wanting at a least a literate and numerate helot workforce and the paternalistic liberals seeing it as a decent first stage. But only a quarter of Grade 7 pupils could go to High School and even then for half it was a two-year vocational F2 curriculum.
The RF was not going to assign the budgets required for anything more and the ideologues were not going to have much competition for “white” jobs. In 1980 the decisions were taken to give every child the entitlement to 7 years of primary and four years of secondary
...with fees set low enough that this was a meaningful entitlement. The starting year was to be 1981. To give the Education Ministry its due it performed a number of miracles with well-thought urgent policies.
