The numbers behind Zimbabwe’s heart-breaking economic decline
Zimbabwe’s economy has fallen to the 20th biggest in sub-Saharan Africa from 10th when President Robert Mugabe came into power almost four decades ago. The Southern African nation’s military took control from Mugabe on Wednesday, fuelling the tentative hope that a new leader could reverse the effects of policies that led to a collapse in agricultural production, hyperinflation and the exodus of an about 3-million people. These charts show some of the economic challenges any new government will face in Zimbabwe. In 2000, Mugabe’s government authorised the often-violent seizure of about 4,500 mostly white-owned commercial farms to redistribute to blacks in a land-reform programme that human-rights groups slammed. Exports of tobacco, the nation’s biggest foreign-currency earner among agricultural products, collapsed. The farm seizures crippled agricultural output, with the tobacco shipments starting to return to previous levels only last year. Still, the nation, which was the world’s f...
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