Tanzania ─ The Path to Prosperity

This book, the third in the Africa: Policies for Prosperity series, is concerned with the challenges of securing economic prosperity in Tanzania over the coming decades.

Building on widespread economic reforms in the early 1990s, Tanzania has recorded steady economic growth over the last two decades, despite the downturn in global economic fortunes since 2008. The process of reform is continuous, however, and the challenge facing the current generation of policymakers is how to harness these favourable gains in macroeconomic stability and turn them into a coherent strategy for labour-intensive, inclusive growth over the coming decades. The next twenty years offer huge opportunity but also huge challenges to Tanzania. The pace of economic transformation and integration into the regional and global economy is picking up; society is becoming much more urban and with population growth remaining high, the need for high-quality employment, especially amongst the young, has never been so pressing. At the same time, the discovery of large natural gas reserves and a programme of heavy investment in transport and communications infrastructure creates the opportunity for Tanzania not just to exploit its natural locational advantage, but to finance the investment in this transformation.

This volume brings leading international and national scholars into the policy arena to examine these challenges and to lay out, in a rigorous but accessible manner, economic policy options facing policymakers in Tanzania.

Christopher Adam is Professor of Development Economics at the University of Oxford, UK and Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. He is currently the Lead Academic for Tanzania for the International Growth Centre (IGC) and Visiting Scholar at the IMF, working on the DFID-IMF Macroeconomic Research Programme on Low-Income Countries. He studied economics at the University of St Andrews and Nuffield College, Oxford. His academic research focuses on the macroeconomics of low-income countries, particularly those of sub-Saharan Africa.
Paul Collier is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. He took a five year Public Service leave, 1998-2003, during which he was Director of the Research Development Department of the World Bank. He is also a Professeur invite at Sciences Po, and at Paris 1. In 2008 he was awarded a CBE 'for services to scholarship and development'. He is the author of The Bottom Billion, which in 2008 won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross and Corine prizes and in May 2009 was the joint winner of the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book prize. He is Advisor to the Strategy and Policy Department of the IMF and advisor to the Africa Region of the World Bank. He writes for the Independent, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Benno Ndulu was appointed Governor of the Central Bank of Tanzania in January 2008. He started his career at the University of Dar es Salaam in the early 1980s before joining the World Bank as a Lead Economist. He is best known for his involvement in setting up and developing one of the most effective research and training networks in Africa, the African Economic Research Consortium. He received an honorary doctorate from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague in 1997 in recognition of his contributions to Capacity Building and Research on Africa. Following his Ph.D. degree in economics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, he taught economics and published widely on growth, adjustment, governance and trade.