Malawi
Malawi’s economic growth in 2011 slowed to 5.8% from 6.7% in 2010 due to reduced donor inflows and shortages of foreign exchange and essential commodities such as fuel and inputs for manufacturing. The economy is projected to slow further, with growth falling to 5.0% and 5.2% in 2012 and 2013.
The political and macroeconomic environment remained stable in Malawi through 2010. Malawi's real gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated to fall to 6.7% in 2010 from 7.6% in 2009. The slight reduction in real GDP growth is largely attributed to reduced agriculture output for maize and tobacco due to the drought experienced in some parts of the country at the beginning of the 2009/10 growing season. The main driving force for economic growth in 2010 has been strong performance in mining and quarrying, construction, financial and insurance services and information and technology. Real GDP growth is forecast at 6.4% in 2011 and 6.0% in 2012 reflecting stability in uranium output and levelling off of productivity gains in the agriculture sector as the agricultural growth rate has peaked.
The Kayelekera uranium project, located in the Karonga district of the northern region of Malawi about 600 km by road from the capital city of Lilongwe, was successfully brought into production by Paladin Energy Ltd. in 2009. Transport of the first product to Walvis Bay, Namibia, via Zambia, took place on 17 August 2009. Uranium production, by open-pit mining, with an annual production of 1 270 tU, expected to be achieved in 2010, is expected to continue for some nine years.
Macroeconomic policy performance has been generally consistent and strong although government commitment weakened as the country approached and held 2009 presidential and parliamentary elections. Domestic revenue performance was robust at an estimated 29.8% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009/10, buoyed by recent institutional and administrative tax reforms. The creation of the Large Tax Payers Unit and the expansion of the auditing function under the Malawi Revenue Authority have helped improve the efficiency of tax mobilisation. However, an escalation in domestic debt which increased domestic interest payments and expansion of the fertiliser subsidy well beyond initial budget plans offset the benefits of the strong revenue performance, widening the fiscal deficit to 5.4% of GDP in 2009.
The Constitution of Malawi upholds the principle of equal rights for men. After the Constitution was adopted in 1994, the government established a Law Commission to assess whether existing legislation was compatible with the aims of the Constitution. Malawi has been profoundly modernised since it embraced democracy in 1994, yet it remains a very traditional society. There is a wide discrepancy between the declarations in the Constitution and the actual relationship between men and women, and customary law acts as a norm in the socialisation process. The country’s media contributes to the wide-ranging debate on these questions.
MALAWI RANKS AMONG THE WORLD’S most densely populated and least developed countries. Nevertheless, its macroeconomic performance has been impressive in recent years, with gross domestic product (GDP) growing by 8.4 per cent in 2008 compared to 7.9 per cent in 2007. Underpinning this has been a good performance by the agricultural sector, although output growth at 10.1 per cent was slightly lower than in the previous fiscal year. The government’s input subsidy programme combined with ample rains across the country has resulted in good harvests in maize and other crops over the past few years.
The Kayelekera uranium project is located in the Karonga district of the northern region of Malawi, about 600 km by road from the capital city of Lilongwe. Uranium production, by open-pit mining, with an annual production of 1 270 tU, is expected to start in 2009 and continue for some seven to nine years.
DESPITE REMAINING ONE OF THE POOREST and least developed countries in Africa,Malawi is beginning to make real progress in terms of laying the foundations for faster economic growth and more effective poverty reduction.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, with much of its population dependent on agriculture, either directly or indirectly. This application seeks to examine the impact that agricultural policy changes will have on different types of household within Malawi, and how different households will respond to those changes.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. It was ranked 165th out of 177 countries according to the 2005 United Nations Human Development Index and had the second lowest GDP per capita in 2003. By all measures, the Malawian economy went through very difficult times in 2005. It faced serious food shortages with an estimated 4.85 million people, i.e. nearly 50 per cent of the population in need of emergency food support. Moreover, 2005 has been a year of political turmoil, with the president facing possible impeachment and resigning from his party to form a new one, an initiative which has very little support in parliament.
Informal employment, defined through the lack of employment-based social protection, constitutes the bulk of employment in developing countries, and entails a level of vulnerability to poverty and other risks that are borne by all who are dependent on informal work income. Results from the Key Indicators of Informality based on Individuals and their Households database (KIIbIH) show that a disproportionately large number of middle‑class informal economy workers receive remittances. Such results confirm that risk management strategies, such as migration, play a part in minimising the potential risks of informal work for middle‑class informal households who may not be eligible to social assistance. They further suggest that middle‑class informal workers may have a solvent demand for social insurance so that, if informality-robust social insurance schemes were made available to them, remittances could potentially be channelled to finance the extension of social insurance to the informal economy.
As part of the peer review of Ireland, a team of examiners and the OECD secretariat visited Malawi in February 2014. The team met with the Ambassador, Irish development co-operation professionals, partner country civil servants, other bilateral and multilateral partners, and representatives of Irish and partner country civil society organisations, the private sector, and district authorities.
Using household data from 15 countries in Latin America and Africa, this paper explores linkages between informality and education-occupation matching. The paper applies a unified methodology to measuring education-occupation mismatches and informality, consistently with the international labour and statistical standards in this area. The results suggest that in the majority of low- and middle-income developing countries with available data, workers in informal jobs have higher odds of being undereducated as compared to workers in formal jobs. Workers in formal jobs, in contrast, have higher chances of being overeducated. These results are consistent for dependent as well as for independent workers. They also hold for men and for women according to the gender-disaggregated analysis. Moreover, in the majority of countries considered in this paper, the matching-informality nexus is also related to the extent of informality in a given area: in labour markets with higher informality, informal workers in particular have a higher chance of being undereducated. The paper discusses policy implications of these findings.