Reflections on Zimbabwe’s past and future: Tradeoffs between the Lexus and the Baobab tree

Abstract

Abstract. In early 2018, President Mnangagwa seemingly struck a new tone to the Western world that was welcoming, rather than antagonistic to business investment (Mnangagwa, 2018). Nonetheless, recent and continued land expropriations, continued deficit spending and a severe shortage of cash liquidity have made any recovery a very challenging prospect. Outside observers now have differing outlooks on Zimbabwe, ranging from uniformly “negative” to “mixed”, “neutral” or “cautiously optimistic” (World Bank, 2018; Mining Review Africa, 2018; Mdzungairi, 2018) My recent take on the country in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal sided with the cautiously optimistic group (Richardson, 2018), but it appears I was too sanguine.

Keywords. Reflections, Baobab tree, Zimbabwe, Tradeoffs.

JEL. B1, B50, F11, F13, G10.