Zimbabwean Trade Liberalisation: Ex Post Evaluation.

The recent trade liberalization in Zimbabwe offers an opportunity of understanding short-run adjustment responses to reform. The immediate experience involved contraction in output and employment, a consumption boom, the inflow of imports, and a rising trade deficit. The analytical challenge is to disentangle the effects of liberalization from the serious drought that coincided with it. An economywide CGE model is used for counterfactual experiments. The opening-up of final goods markets is shown to contribute to deindustrialization and contraction. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.