For a long time, restaurants in Ethiopia have been offering a wide variety of stews to their customers. These days, the ‘less is more’ philosophy has taken root in cities like Addis Ababa, where some restaurants are specializing in shiro, while others offer a small handful of options to go with the traditional stew.
Since 1826, Pittards has been making high quality leather in England. The company set foot in Ethiopia in 2009 when it took over the management of the state owned Ethiopian Tannery. Two years later, the company bought the factory and started supplying leather to the four companies under Pittards Products Manufacturing (PPM). EBR’s Ashenafi Endale sat down with Tsedenia Mekbib, managing director at Pittards Ethiopia, to learn more.
Established in 1998, EthioAgri-CEFT is a private company operating under MIDROC Ethiopia Investment Group and engaged in the production and processing of various agricultural crops. The company owns two of the three commercial tea plantations currently operating in Ethiopia: WushWush and Gumaro, in South Western part of the country. The company began exporting tea to the global market five years ago and introduced Ethiopia’s tea to international buyers. EBR sat down with Isayas Kebede, general manager, to learn more about the company’s efforts to penetrate the global tea market and the challenges it is facing.
At this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, participants did not question the basic building blocks of growth in today’s global economy: free markets, good governance, and investment in human capital and infrastructure. But they did criticize how unfairly the benefits of growth are being distributed. Rightly so: without a strong policy response aimed at building a more inclusive growth model, rising populism and economic nationalism will impair the functioning of markets and overall macroeconomic stability – potentially cutting short the current global recovery.
Ethiopia has experienced a steady stream of internal displacement over the years, but the number of people affected rose sharply in 2016 and the first half of 2017. This was due to natural disasters and conflict, according to a newly report released by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre entitled Africa Report on Internal Displacement.
Respected economists have long pointed out that gross domestic product (GDP) is an inadequate measure of economic development and social well-being, and thus should not be policymakers’ sole fixation. Yet we have not gotten any closer to finding a feasible alternative to GDP.
On October 11, 2017, the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) devaluated the birr by 15Pct against the basket of major hard currencies. According to the press briefing given by Yohannes Ayalew, vice governor of the NBE, the motive behind the devaluation was to encourage exports and attract investment.
As revealed later in the explanatory note attached to the bill introduced to parliament regarding federal government supplementary budget, this time around, the NBE’s measure was a means to raise money and contribute to windfall tax that was later earmarked to make significant contribution to the budget.
The private sector in Ethiopia is positioned as a supplement to the state-owned economy. In the last 55 years, the share of the private sector in the gross domestic product (GDP) has remained low at an average of 12.5Pct. Currently, it stands at 20Pct. This means that the ability of the private sector to organize and push for regulatory reforms has been limited because of the top-down approach to development. In this article, I advocate for bottom-up, local, and endogenous approach to private sector development in order to increase the size of private sector, its organizational capacity, and its political and economic role.
From London to Lagos, “affordable housing” has become an oxymoron. In most cities, rents and home prices have increased faster than incomes, and in urban areas with robust job markets, housing stocks have failed to keep pace with demand. Some 330 million urban households either live in substandard housing, or pay more for their housing than they can afford. If current trends are not reversed, that number could grow to 440 million by 2025.
Ethiopia has a long tradition of creating artistic works that critique society and politics. One such artistic work currently on stage, is Festalen, widely known among the public after the character–Eyayu Fungus. The one-man-show has been wowing audiences since its debut in 2014. EBR’s adjunct writer Meseret Mamo attended the show at the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences on December 16.
Ethiopian Business Review
Ashenafi Endale
Sergei Guriev
Urs Rohner
Yohannes Woldegebriel
Tsegaye Tegenu (PhD)
Jan Mischke
Meseret Mamo