According to the National Development Plan (NDP), the economy needs to grow at more than 5 per cent a year until 2030 if we are to achieve the goals of eliminating poverty, ensuring that 60 per cent of adults would be in work (up from about 44 per cent at present) and reducing inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient from 0.69 to 0.60. Over the past five years, the economy has grown at just over 2 per cent a year and, following a rapid further drop, is now expected to grow at about 1 per cent a year for the next few years.Sustaining rapid growth over a long period would be unusual for a middle income country. A lot needs to go right for this to happen: education policy
must work; savings and investment rates must be high; benign international
environments and technological changes are helpful. This report focuses on one of the most important reasons why the economy has performed so sluggishly: the fact that our policy-makers have generally failed to address the most significant constraints on economic growth and have often chosen,
instead, to pursue policies with an adverse impact on growth.
