Biti announces the country’s 2010 budget, aimed at stimulating the flagging economy, in Parliament today.
In written proposals to Biti, the portfolio committee said given the current global economic crisis, “the need to craft a growth-oriented and pro-poor budget framework can not be over emphasised” if Zimbabwe was to sustain the current recovery momentum.
The economy has been slowly coming out of comatose after the formation of a government of national unity between President Robert Mugabe and his bitter archrival Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai last February.
“A pro-poor and gender-sensitive national budget framework which places emphasis on labour-intensive strategies to absorb the large reserve pool of labour, whilst promoting macroeconomic stability to protect incomes should be adopted,” said the parliamentary committee.
Warning that economic growth alone did not mean reduction in poverty levels unless accompanied by job creation, the committee urged Biti to focus in his budget on improving agriculture, the traditional backbone of the economy and source of livelihood for a vast majority of the country’s 12 million people.
Biti, who is from Tsvangirai’s MDC party, was also urged to focus on infrastructure development, export production, investment drive, labour intensive and industrial growth model, mining and social investment as a way to stimulate employment creation.
* Zimonline
