The Ethiopian government has announced today that the country’s currency notes are demonetized. The public is given a three months window to exchange old currency notes from the banks. The birr notes affected through this change were 100, 50, and 10 denominations. The change includes introduction of a new 200 Read more…
In a speech in 1959, J. F. Kennedy has famously said “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger and one represents opportunity.” Langan-Riekhof and others have gone so far as saying “Sometimes the world needs a crisis” to turn challenges into Read more…
Krugman, Nobel Laureate and New York Times Columnist, observed that “the economic contraction we’re experiencing is the fastest on record, by a large margin; we’ve probably lost as many jobs over the past two weeks as we did in the whole of the Great Recession. The policy response is also Read more…
It was within a few months of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD)’s administration coming into office that a radical economic reform program was launched. The government announced their decision to privatize key public enterprises, including Ethio telecom, Ethiopian Airlines and other public utilities. The urgency with which the authorities got Read more…
Ethiopia needs a deeper economic reform agenda that is rooted in evidence-based decision-making. A cursory glance through Ethiopia’s economic literature leaves one to wonder if there are two Ethiopias. On the one hand, official reports paint a rosy picture. It has often been referred to as one of the fastest-growing Read more…
In December 2019 alone, Ethiopia’s external debt stock has increased by about US$ 9 billion. The multilateral agencies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, each approved about US$ 3 billion. The VOA has quoted PM Abiy’s tweet referring to unnamed source pledging yet another US$ 3 billion. Read more…
In the middle of one night Miss Clavel turned on the light And said, “Something is not right!” – “Madeline,” by Ludwig Bemelmans, 1939 (As quoted by Ruth Marcus, Deputy editorial page editor, Washington Post, May 26, 2017) I listened to Obboo Lemma Megarsa’s interview with VOA and felt exactly Read more…
The Ethiopian parliament session held on October 22, 2019 will be remembered for PM Abiy Ahmed’s few remarks that has had far reaching consequences. Those explanations were made in the context of replying to questions posed by some parliamentarians. In this piece, I will focus on only two of those Read more…
I am prompted to write this piece by a news item reported by Capital Ethiopia Newspaper that the government has changed the banking business proclamation, opening the insurance industry to Ethiopians diaspora, specifically those who hold foreign nationality but Ethiopian by birth. This particular group of the diaspora community has Read more…
Every time the Ethiopian government releases news regarding privatization of public enterprises, we hear a lot about a magic number, 49%! This is to underline that the public enterprises would be privatized only partially. In order to stress this point, the 49% figure is given some prominence to indicate that Read more…