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Business Reporter
CAPTAINS of industry, policy makers and other stakeholders meet in Harare tomorrow to discuss pricing complexities presented by the multicurrency environment, including issues stemming from the dual currency regime, inflation and exchange rate.
According to organisers, CAA Business School, the event will be attended by business leaders from Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, Consumer Council of Zimbabwe, Confederation of Zimbabwe Retailers and the Reserve bank of Zimbabwe.
Despite progressively reducing inflation to a two year low last year, after it peaked at a post dollarisation high of 837,5 percent in 2020, Zimbabwe has seen resurgent inflation amid exchange rate volatility for much of this year.
The situation had been further compounded by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which disrupted supply chains and sent global commodity prices soaring and fueling inflation across the world, already under pressure due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Pricing is increasingly becoming complex due to the multicurrency regime, inflation and exchange rates. We explore the current legal framework around exchange rates and pricing, a look into the retailer’s perspective and value chain, insights into consumer behaviour and shifts in response to a controlled market and regulatory perspective,” CAA Business School said.
Strategic options on the way forward will be generated and evaluated during the engagements at today’s seminar. Among the attendees will be retail and corporate managers, business consultants, regulators and business associations.
This comes amid growing price stability, which has also put the skids on runaway inflation, in the economy following the cocktail of measures introduced by the Government to rein in exchange rate volatility and resurgent inflation.
The Treasury recently asked all Government ministries, departments and agencies to review contracts to ensure that all prices are pegged in line with the legal requirement to be based on the willing buyer willing seller system.
This followed the realisation that some of the contractors who were receiving large payments for supplying the Government or after carrying out public infrastructure programmes were the ones fueling exchange rate volatility when they bought forex on the parallel market.
The Treasury has also taken the decision to pay half the value of amounts payable for supplies to Government, ministries, departments and agencies in hard currency as part of measures to reduce the amount of liquidity that was being used to attack the domestic currency.
On its part, the central bank has tightened the screws on excess liquidity by hiking lending rates, after setting the bank policy or benchmark rate at 200 percent while statutory reserve levels were also significantly increased to limit the amount of money readily available to the institutions for on-lending.
Online Reporter