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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Appearances
David Blair is chief foreign correspondent at the Daily Telegraph.
He lived in Harare for three years, and when the Zimbabwean government started publishing its budgets online, he began looking into them.
A lot of what he found didn't surprise him.
David Blair.
We asked to speak to someone from the ZANU-PF party to talk about the figures, but no one was available.
In a country with disappointing growth, high unemployment, and where investment in schools and healthcare to help the next generation is pretty much non-existent, is there any good economic news for the people of Zimbabwe?
Well, yes.
In 2008, inflation in the country hit a peak of 79.6 billion percent, which led to the currency crashing and worthless notes littering the streets.
As a result, the government started using the US dollar in 2009, which has helped the poor but not been so kind to the government, as Russell Lamberty, chief strategist at ETM Analytics and co-author of the book When Money Destroys Nations, explains.
If the strain on the money supply does become too great, Russell Lamberti points out Zimbabwe does potentially have other good options.
Russell Lamberty.
Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party held its annual conference this week.
No doubt the ailing economy was on the agenda.
As Russell points out, deflation is not good news for a government with debts, because as prices decline, government revenue declines, while the terms of servicing the debt remain unchanged.
The International Monetary Fund estimate that Zimbabwe has external debts of more than $10 billion.
And in September, it told the country to repay $142 million in overdue payments before it's eligible for any more credit.
That's a demand Patrick Chinamasa says his country cannot meet.
That's all we've got time for this week.
If there are any numbers you'd like us to check or explain, please do email us at moreorless at bbc.co.uk.
And you can also download this programme and many others for free at our website bbcworldservice.com forward slash more or less.
Showing 61–80 of 694 · page 4 of 35
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