Online Reporter
VISION 2030, the attainment by Zimbabwe of a upper middle income economy, is not some abstraction, at least in Government eyes, but rather a combination of millions of ordinary people being able to spend US$9 a day.
While in theory a small and incredibly wealthy elite perched in the midst of widespread poverty may well generate the required average national income of US$4 500 set by the World Bank to qualify for upper middle income status, the result would in fact be fairly meaningless for most people, just the application of the law of averages to an incredibly unfair economy.
While Southern Africa inherited seriously unequal societies at independence or the introduction of democracy, since the colonial and settler societies were built on and were sustained by this serious economic inequality, Governments in the region have been pushing hard to combine both growth and greater spread of wealth.
This has involved direct policies to push a lot of the required economic growth among people and communities that were held back.
This is not just good justice in economic policy, but practically tends to ensure that a given investment will give greater total results since moving people at the bottom of the heap usually requires less investment per person than moving people at the top of the heap ever higher.
However, the growing inequality in many societies in recent years, with small groups of multi-billionaires locking up increasing percentages of the world’s wealth while the far larger population they float in gets poorer in real terms, has been seen by many from the Pope down as a serious social problem.
Zimbabwe has nailed its economic development onto a number of policies to encourage investment and the opening of new business on one side, but making sure that skills increase and that ever more people can earn a decent living in either formal employment or using their own business skills. A central plank of the policy is that no place and no person can be left behind.
This policy of making sure new wealth is created in many places and is created by a large majority of the population can be seen in how the results are measured.
The Government is less fussed about averages that seem to work and far more concerned that most people have real money in their wallets and can buy real things.
In his pre-budget workshops, the Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion, Mthuli Ncube, very carefully defined a middle income country as one where a lot of people are themselves middle income and have the defined average income in their pocket and able to be spent.
No one wants to recreate the colonial settler system of a small minority having a decent life and the rest of the people being either extremely limited in their access to training and business openings, or working in a skewed economy that moved wealth into a very limited number of hands.
For all effective purposes, Zimbabwe is now a middle income country, that is one with that average income of US$9 a day and with growth rates good enough to push this income higher to the US$12 a day required to reach upper middle-income status.
Prof Ncube thought this was totally possible, and even the worst case of slower growth with above average numbers of droughts or other problems, would see Zimbabwe very close to that figure.
The Government is determined to maintain the sort of fundamentals that have seen some of the highest growth rates in the world, and the budget soon to be announced for next year slots into the second stage of the National Development Strategy and will, as usual, be fiscally conservative so that Government plays its essential role of helping keeping inflation low.
Here we go back to that more useful definition of upper middle income, that is the number of people who can be defined as such. Low inflation makes it far easier to add to this number continually, since most people with that sort of income will be doing something productive to create that stream of income.
While taxes have to be levied to raise funds for the provision of social requirements from education onwards, plus the essential infrastructure we all rely on directly and indirectly, Zimbabwe has under the Second Republic been fairly light in its touch, again to make sure we spread the burdens as well as the rewards fairly.
The multi-pronged approach to economic gain now in place fulfills the two main requirements to create new wealth and make sure large numbers share so that the attainment of the upper middle income status is grounded on the policy that we are all generally upper middle income.
