African import-export bank has approved USD500 million, which will be shared among 18 commercial banks in Ethiopia.
“I have also asked Afrexim bank to open office in Ethiopia,” said Yinager Dessie, governor of National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), after launching a two-day technical discussion between Afrexim and Ethiopian banks, on how to utilize and return the loan.
The Need to Take Necessary Precautions to Avoid Regret. (Part II)
In the first part of this article, I illustrated some of the national economic and political hardship that can follow financial sector liberalization with empirical evidence from Argentina and Turkey. In this and final part, I shall present two success stories related to financial liberalization: Ghana and China. I will also suggest what Ethiopia should do to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of its seemingly inevitable liberalization of finance.
The need to take necessary precautions to avoid regret.
Since the unveiling of the administration’s Homegrown Economic Reform Plan and restart of the accession process with the World Trade Organization (WTO), talks of economic liberalization have been heating up in Ethiopia. Indeed, the liberalization process of the telecom sector is well underway and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) himself has indicated that the hitherto closed financial sector will be next in line. Speeding up of WTO accession is one of the plans in the plan. The government’s aspirations of reforming the economy and WTO accession may imply that the government will inevitably open up the financial sector in the near future, with the ongoing deregulations set as good launching pads.
Ashenafi Assefa