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Zimbabwe finance minister sees economy growing 9.3 per cent in 2011
Jul 26, 2011, 16:08 GMT
Harare - The Zimbabwean economy is expected to expand 9.3 per cent this year, despite instability in the country's coalition government, Finance Minister Tendai Biti told parliament on Tuesday.
Presenting his mid-term budget, Biti said inflation would meet the target of 4 per cent this year. The government would spend 2.7 billion dollars this year against generated revenue of 2.25 billion.
'We have to find an extra 700 million until end of the year,' he said. 'We are still on course to achieve our GDP growth rate of 9.3 per cent.'
Agriculture and mining, with growth of 19.3 per cent and 44 per cent respectively, are at the epicentre of this growth.
Until 2009, when a coalition government was formed, Zimbabwe's economy had registered a decade of negative growth with critics pointing at President Robert Mugabe's land seizure policy as the main cause.
Biti, from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the two-year-old coalition government, has been at loggerheads with Mugabe.
He publicly refused to give in to Mugabe's demands to award a 100 per cent salary increment to government workers in June saying the economy was still performing badly.
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