Malawi slips on economic index: Rising income inequality
Malawi has slipped on an economic index by six steps, from I82 to 190, prompting economists to advise the government change the trend.
An international organisation, Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Transformation Index (BTI) says it has been collecting data from 129 countries in the last three years before coming up with the index.
BTI says Malawi is also failing to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor as the halves are increasingly becoming richer whilst the halve nots are increasingly becoming poorer.
The organisation acknowledged economic problems the country is going through following donor aid withdrawal and natural disasters.
BTI analyzes and evaluates whether and how the surveyed countries are steering social change toward democracy and a market economy with a total of 17 criteria, including rule of law, stability of democratic institutions, political and social integration, level of social-economic development, organization of the market and compensation, currency and price stability, private property economic performance, sustainability, consensus building and international cooperation.
“The independence of the Reserve Bank of Malawi [RBM] remains debatable given that the President appoints the governor and the two deputies. In fact, the trend has been that any change in the political leadership has resulted in changes in the central bank’s top leadership,” reads the report in part.
Economists Association chairman Henry Kachaje said the report is a wake up call for the government to address economic problems the counrtry is going through.
“This is a very good feedback which shows the economic developments undertaken by the government asre not benefitting the majority poor. This means are economic development plans are not coherent,” said Kachaje.
He blamed all this on politics saying governments tend to abandon economic. Programmes initiated by previous governments just for political reasons.
Malawi Economic Justice Network executive director Dalitso Kubalasa asked the government to take the report seriously and improve on the highlighted shortfalls.
Ministry of Finance spokesperson Nations Msowoya blamed the slip on the economic index to donor drought and natural disasters like drought and floods.
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Candidly,I beg you to exclude the northerners for destroying our country’s economic development for since independence,leadership has been coming from the South and Central regions,so please brothers as a northerner myself,I strongly believe that the Northerners must be spared from being part and parcel of the present economic havoc which has plunged our nation into both economic and political disaster beyond fixations.You have even overworked our Goodal Gondwe and later accuse him of misleading the economy.Please let him rest and put a southerner or a central in his stead.Gondwe has been on the stage for a long time he needs… Read more »
These ‘indexes’ are a waste of time and money and indicate nothing.
Comparing Malawi to x-number of African and / or World Countries DOES NOT REFLECT THE TRUE PICTURE TO BE BENEFICIAL TO US OR ANYTHING ELSE.
This is another issue like our GROSSLY OVER HASH-TAGGED WORLD. TELL US what we need to do TODAY to start reversing the process TOMORROW!
I know I’m sick. TELL ME THE DAMN CURE!
The inequalities are increasing because of poor economic policy
The government of Malawi should not make excuses. Malawi is still poor today because of bad leadership we had since 1963. There is not good story to tell about our economy since we had independence 53 years ago. All because of bad leadership we had. Donors had been giving aid from 6 July 1964 until 2013. Yet Malawi is still poor. How many times Malawi’s debt being cancelled. Yet our leaders did not took advantage of the cancellation of debts by donors and develop Malawi. Instead it was our leaders chance to steal and leave our country still poor. We… Read more »
What do you expect? this is a consumer nation (a man in rags pretending to be bill gates, paja amati mtima suvala sanza). We have NOT seen any poverty, its coming….. eating us like cancer slow but silent!!!
O…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..O “If all of us, the President, Ministers, PSs, Analysts, Commentators, NGOs e.t.c. do not know what our problems are; and we should wait for somebody else to come from somewhere and tell us; then we have a very big problem.” – Bingu Wa Mutharika (2009 Interview with CNBC) Look now . . . . . . Kachaje looks at this revelation as a wake-up call; what was the World Bank’s report (which revealed that Malawi is the poorest country in the whole universe)? So we were still asleep and we should wake up now? Ha! Laughable! And at the… Read more »
Why did I see the celebration on TVM about the IMF for? Silly.