{{The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called for uniform fiscal and macro-economic policies in the 19 states of the eastern and southern Africa bloc.}}<\/p>\n
AfDB says, this move will boost fiscal surveillance at the regional and national levels. It will also set the stage for a monetary union.<\/p>\n
\u201cFiscal convergence is essential to Comesa\u2019s macroeconomic convergence programme, and is a bridge between monetary and trade integration programmes,\u201d AfDB President Donald Kaberuka said in a report, titled \u201cFacilitating Multilateral Fiscal Surveillance in Monetary Union Context with Focus on Comesa Region.\u201d <\/p>\n
The report which was made public last week, had been commissioned by the Comesa Secretariat two years ago.<\/p>\n
The report proposed establishment of a single currency for the Comesa region, a move that is seen as a stepping stone in cementing regional economic growth. <\/p>\n
By 2015, the report says the 19 countries are supposed to maintain an overall budget deficit to GDP ratio of 4%, an annual average inflation rate of not more than 3%, and keep external reserves of at least five months of imports.<\/p>\n
It also recommended that the countries should have eliminated central bank financing of budget deficits over the same period.<\/p>\n
However, Prof. Manasseh Nshuti, Rwanda\u2019s former Finance and Economic Planning Minister said, though the single currency initiative is important, this is not the right time to propose it. <\/p>\n
He said a strong financial independence of member countries should first be sought.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to have harmonized fiscal regimes and we still have other outstanding issues like corruption, lack of transparency and different inflation rates, meaning that it might be difficult for the member countries to sort these issues,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
VENTURES AFRICA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called for uniform fiscal and macro-economic policies in the 19 states of the eastern and southern Africa bloc.}} AfDB says, this move will boost fiscal surveillance at the regional and national levels. It will also set the stage for a monetary union. \u201cFiscal convergence is essential to Comesa\u2019s macroeconomic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[75],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-5191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","tag-homenews","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5191"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=5191"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=5191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}