Zimbabwe Infrastructure Dialogue in Roads, Railways, Water,
Energy, and Telecommunication Sub-Sectors

In the 1990s, Zimbabwe's economic
growth began to slow following a balance of payments crisis
and repeated droughts. By the late 1990s Zimbabwe's
economy was in serious trouble driven by economic
mismanagement, political violence, and the wider impact of
the land reform program on food production. During 2007
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contract by more than 6
percent, making the cumulative output decline over 35
percent since 1999. The unrelenting economic deterioration
is doing long-term damage to the foundations of the
Zimbabwean economy, private sector investment is virtually
zero, infrastructure has deteriorated, and skilled
professionals have left the country. With inflation
accelerating, the Government introduced, in 2007, blanket
price controls and ordered businesses to cut prices by half.
Despite the strict price controls inflation continues to
rise as the root cause of high inflation, monetization of
the large public sector financing needs remains unaddressed.
A large part of the high public sector deficit is due to
quasi-fiscal spending by the central bank on mainly
concessional credits and subsidized foreign exchange for
priority sectors, unrealized exchange rate losses, and
losses incurred by the central bank's open market
operations to mop up liquidities.