Statistical requirements for montioring and evaluating short- term policy reforms and long- term development programmes

Abstract

Since the first half of the 1970s, African countries had been experiencing serious economic distortions which grew progressively worst so much so that by the early 1980s the African region as a whole had come into deep recession and a serious economic crisis. Evidence of this abounds: structural imbalances between consumption and savings; imports and exports; investment and domestic savings; installed physical capacity and management capacity; chronic government budget deficits; chronic deficits on trade and current accounts of the balance of payment; mounting external debtedness and debt service obligations; the precipitous retrogression in almost all major indicators of economic and social progress; marked disintegration of the productive, physical and social infrastructure, and the resulting erosion of production, productivity and the standard of living. In order to redress the situation, most governments are implementing stabilization (viz: fiscal, monetary and exchange rate) policies and structural adjustment programmes {SAPs), the latter aimed at introducing discrete, as compared to marginal, changes in policies in response to discrete shocks.