T H E B I R T H D A Y

The coming New Year, “Enqutatash”, described after the Apostle John, is the birthday of the Third Millennium according to the Julian/Ethiopian Calendar. So, everybody smells millennium in body and soul ready to celebrate it as the sky clears itself from the heavy clouds of winter.
The Millennium is unique indeed, to all Ethiopians as every one is expected to work for a result, including self-employment that will augment the standard of living of the people by raising the level of national income that will surely change the real personal income of every Ethiopian.
This will mean or require, obviously, fast change in the country’s terms of trade. Ethiopia’s export trade, and principally tourism industry, among other things, should improve incrementally the foreign currency earnings to cover comfortably her import and investment requirements. In turn, this will require intensifying and transforming the nation’s agricultural led economy from rain-fed to one of irrigation system, and expand, at the same time, her agro-industry side by side to change her overall status from raw material to finished goods exporting nation. This will give rise to the need of strengthening the country’s capability to export more agro- industrial products step by step until it will establish a full blow industrial economy.
The experience and the increased foreign currency earnings to be gained from her agro-industries will be instrumental to harness the industrial sector proper to her advantage so that she becomes gradually a self-confident nation of paramount esteem.
The nascent condition of the Ethiopian economy, today, is in a reassuring phase, admitting that anomalies still exist, like inflation. However, as statistics reveal, Ethiopia is mainly an agricultural society. It seems to me, then, that this fact alone may have prompted the present agricultural led economy. At the same time, it is sure that the pyramid or the income bracket of the people shows that Ethiopia has a very few wealthy people at the top, while the majority at the bottom are poor farmers. So, it goes without saying that she is a nation stratified chiefly into a few upper-class and a lot of lower class people, with only a handful of middle class folks. This requires filling up the gap, evidently.
Nonetheless, with the coming up of modern life in Ethiopia through the formation of corporate bodies, private businesses and self-employments, today there are people in these organizations, who earn good returns on their investments or receive comfortable dividends on their shares, which were, perhaps, negligible some twelve or thirteen years back. In other words, the Ethiopian economy is creating today middle class people, par excellence. This has to be encouraged since the big gap between the very few rich and the vast low-class of peoples should be filled so that there will be steady increase of consumer goods of substantial worth that will pass the ISO 9001:2000 QMS for home and export purposes
It is everybody’s guess that through conscious planning growth will then be recorded in Ethiopia, and it seems to me that the strategic intent of the Ethiopian Millennium has much to offer in this respect.
For sure, there were times that some countries were only potential powers in the hierarchy of nations. One may recall the late 30s Japan, and the early 70s India or China. As, the prominent economists, Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus asserted, today, economists generally prefer to use the purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates as opposed to the customary approach of market exchange rates to compare the living standards in different countries. In this respect, who would have believed that China leaps ahead of Japan to become the second-largest economy in the world? In fact, a Geneva international forum foresees that by 2010 China will be ahead of the USA in this respect—although some argue that it is already in the lead.
Of course, there is a sharp difference between market exchange rate and PPP. When market exchange rates are used, on the basis of supply and demand, the outputs of low-income countries like China and India tend to be understated. This understatement occurs because a substantial part of their output comes in labor-intensive services, which are usually extremely inexpensive to those of high-wage countries. Because of this economic phenomenon, the PPP is preferred to show the dramatic difference between the two.
Of course one thing is obvious. When one says, today, India and China are emerging economic super-powers, the fact remains that there will still be the contradiction of living standards. For instance, e.g. in the case of India, the extreme poor and the multimillionaires will continue to exist side by side for many years to come, while their economies remain drastically changing due to high tech revolution.
By the same token, the Ethiopian Millennium strategic plan has much to offer in this respect. Under the present conscious planning and political will of the State and its leadership, I presume Ethiopia is certain to achieve its planned goals, provided that there will be total commitment and involvement of the work-force, and that work ethics, efficacy and transparency of the bureaucracy are aggressively improved and maintained. If a radical change is achieved in this direction, for sure, every one smells Millennium in body and soul; and Ethiopia will become a medium range economic power in a short while. However, so frightening is the bureaucratic hurdle today, that fighting buck passing, procrastination, corruption, illegal hoarding, and the staggering work ethics should be the concern of all, as improving some policies that may prevent the pace of fast development should be that of government.