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Op/Ed

The government owns the numbers
Dear Editor,
I read your cover page story with great interest as it tries, not successfully though, to answer a question that is always in the back of mind, (Who owns the numbers? Feb, 2015). I said not successfully because your article, great as it was, didn’t push the limits to show your readers how the government is fabricating the country’s GDP. For example, how is that being done? Who are the main culprits of that? How are the Bretton Woods institutions (IMF & WB) negotiating their version of Ethiopia’s GDP with that of the government? Questions like these need to be thoroughly addressed. However, as a bold idea that has not been tried by the mainstream media in Ethiopia, I appreciate your efforts to throwing the right question, probably at the right time.

Nolawi Melakedingil

 
News of sluggish economic performance in the euro zone and across the Atlantic in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis and its destabilizing impact for the world was steadily offset – thanks largely to manufacturing growth in China and commodity riders of the Middle East and Latin America. As the Asian powerhouses demanded more energy, food and metals and had no problem paying for it, suppliers of Brazilian ore and their counterparts in the Gulf and Africa kept investment and growth going. This much is true about the recession in the west and the emergence of growth centers elsewhere, which became a narrative that left the story of a more important growth trajectory taking shape, albeit quietly, in Africa.