******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Zimbabwe doesn’t need to be poor; that’s what’s so devastating. It has copious minerals, well-managed water resources, an educated and ambitious population, a safari park the size of Belgium, and some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. It’s poor in part because of theft on a grand scale: Zimbabwe is being looted by its own government. Small numbers of elite Zimbabweans feel entitled to wealth, and the only way for them to get as rich as they feel they should be is to plunder the parastatals and the public purse. Uncertainty about the current regime and how long it will survive makes for extreme myopia; people are making golden hay while they can. Zimbabwe’s fiscal deficit is around 12 per cent of GDP; you can’t run a deficit that size without stealing from the future. (For comparison, in 2017 the UK’s deficit was 1.8 per cent.) As my economist father says, ‘the temporal discount rate is anomalously high.’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n05/diana-stone/diary _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
