Working Paper

The Changing Economy of Tanzania : Patterns of Accumulation and Structural Change

This paper focuses on the growth in aggregate production in Tanzania. It also deals with the division of GDP across productive sectors in the economy, population growth as well as labour force growth. The processes of economic transformation and structural change since the economic reforms of the late 1980s were essentially characterised by rapid but jobless growth, leading to accentuated divergences in productivity within and between productive sectors, in which agriculture and the informal economy act as sponges that mop up the surplus labour within the economy. The lesson the paper draws from this analysis is that the challenge Tanzania faces today is not to initiate a process of economic transformation, but to reverse the direction of the on-going transformation process by striving for greater convergence of productivity growth with employment growth.