by The Fikiria Desk | Jan 10, 2025 | Economics
An economy can grow for years and still starve its own firms of capital. Ethiopia has done exactly that — expanding output while its enterprises borrowed short, ploughed back earnings or waited on the state, because there was no market to convert savings into...
by The Fikiria Desk | Jul 29, 2024 | Economics
An economy can grow for years and still starve for the one thing that makes growth compound: a price that tells producers what to make. Ethiopia has expanded rapidly for a decade while its foreign-exchange market sent almost no honest signal. On 29 July 2024, the...
by The Fikiria Desk | Dec 13, 2023 | Economics
An economy can be forgiven billions of dollars and feel almost nothing on the ground the next morning. That is the paradox facing Somalia today. The IMF and World Bank have confirmed that the country reached the completion point under the Heavily Indebted Poor...
by The Fikiria Desk | Oct 26, 2023 | Economics
The Democratic Republic of Congo exports more mineral value than almost any economy on the continent, and captures strikingly little of it at home. Metal leaves as concentrate; the margin accrues where the ore is refined, traded and consumed, far from Lualaba. On 26...
by The Fikiria Desk | Jul 17, 2023 | Economics
An IMF programme is usually read as austerity. Read as economics, it is something more precise: a repricing of an entire cost structure that firms have already been paying informally. On 17 July 2023 the IMF’s Executive Board approved a 38-month Extended Credit...