Ben Carter
speaker
694 appearances
29 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2013
last heard Aug 2018
Ben Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Last week, Zimbabwe's Finance Minister, Patrick Chinamasa, delivered his budget for 2015.
His speech gave a fascinating insight into the state of Zimbabwe's economy and the challenge the country faces going forward.
It also contains some rather worrying statistics.
More from David Blair, the chief foreign correspondent at the Daily Telegraph, later.
But first, let's take a look at some of the headline numbers in the budget.
For a lot of economic powerhouses in the West, a predicted growth rate of 3.2% for 2015 would raise a cheer, but there's not much cause for celebration in Zimbabwe for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, countries in Africa are growing on average at 5% per year, and secondly, Patrick Chinamasa had forecast growth of 6.1% for 2014.
One of the reasons that Zimbabwe's economy is struggling to grow is because it has very high unemployment, which Patrick Chinamasa admitted in his budget speech.
Chinamasa didn't put a figure on the unemployment rate, and trying to find an accurate number is quite difficult, as Julian Rademeier, director of fact-checking website AfricaCheck, explains.
We know from a study done in 2011 by the Zimbabwean National Statistics Agency that 6.1 million of the 13 million population were economically active.
5.4 million of those, around 90%, were deemed to be in employment.
But...
Roughly 45% of the 606,000 deemed to be in formal employment are employed by the government.
Zimbabwe's spending budget for 2014 was $3.3 billion.
80.1% of that money was spent on public service wages.
To put that percentage in context, the United Kingdom spends around 23% of its budget on public sector wages.
Zimbabwe's government had previously committed to reducing the amount to 60% by the end of 2014, but they now say it's a problem that can only be resolved in the medium to long term.
they face a difficult task when you consider state employees turned down a 27% pay rise offer earlier this year.
When a government spends four-fifths of its budget on public sector wages, there's little left to spend elsewhere.
So what was spent on healthcare, schools and infrastructure?
Showing 41–60 of 694 · page 3 of 35
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