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Harare - Zimbabwe’s economy is on course to grow by 9.3% in 2011, up from 8.1% percent last year, mainly due to a recovery in the impoverished state’s key mining and agriculture sectors, Finance Minister Tendai Biti said on Tuesday.
“We are still on course to achieve our GDP growth rate of 9.3%. Agriculture and mining, with 19.3% and 44% growth respectively, are at the epicentre of this growth,” Biti said in a half-year budget review statement.
Zimbabwe’s economy has contracted sharply through most of this decade due to what critics said has been economic mismanagement by the government of President Robert Mugabe.
Biti said the country would achieve a year-end inflation rate of 4.0%, lower than the initial forecast of 4.5%. Annual inflation rose to 2.9% in June from 2.5% in May.
Its inflation rate reached 500 billion at the peak of its economic crisis in December 2008, according to IMF figures.
Mugabe was then forced into a unity government that ditched the local currency in favour of US dollars and the rand, bringing stability to the economy once crushed by hyperinflation.
Resource-rich Zimbabwe has experienced single-digit inflation since 2009.
Also helping to keep inflation in check was higher maize output, which Biti said would rise to 1.45 million tonnes in the 2010/11 season from 1.32 million tonnes in 2009/10.
The agricultural sector has started to recover after years of food shortages that were blamed on disruptions caused by Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned commercial farms for black resettlement.
“We are still on course to achieve our GDP growth rate of 9.3%. Agriculture and mining, with 19.3% and 44% growth respectively, are at the epicentre of this growth,” Biti said in a half-year budget review statement.
Zimbabwe’s economy has contracted sharply through most of this decade due to what critics said has been economic mismanagement by the government of President Robert Mugabe.
Biti said the country would achieve a year-end inflation rate of 4.0%, lower than the initial forecast of 4.5%. Annual inflation rose to 2.9% in June from 2.5% in May.
Its inflation rate reached 500 billion at the peak of its economic crisis in December 2008, according to IMF figures.
Mugabe was then forced into a unity government that ditched the local currency in favour of US dollars and the rand, bringing stability to the economy once crushed by hyperinflation.
Resource-rich Zimbabwe has experienced single-digit inflation since 2009.
Also helping to keep inflation in check was higher maize output, which Biti said would rise to 1.45 million tonnes in the 2010/11 season from 1.32 million tonnes in 2009/10.
The agricultural sector has started to recover after years of food shortages that were blamed on disruptions caused by Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned commercial farms for black resettlement.
