Zimbabwe joins economic outcasts

The World Bank was this week to formally classify Zimbabwe as one of the world’s “economic pariahs” as its inflation rate nears 120 percent, with potentially damaging consequences for South Africa and the entire sub-continent, news reports said on Monday. Reports quoted Rogier van den Brink, the bank’s deputy representative in Zimbabwe as saying that Zimbabwe would be accorded “non-accrual status” for failing to make any payment on its debt to the bank for the last six months. He said that there was worse to come saying the country was “in turmoil”. The country’s Gross domestic product in 2001 was expected fall by as much as 10 percent, economists were quoted as saying. “This fragile situation could degenerate even further, with severe economic, social and political consequences to the country itself and to the Southern African region,” he said. The country joins 11 other nations also in arrears to the World Bank for the last six months. They are Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo Republic, Liberia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Bosnia Herzegovina and Burma.