Tanzania

Book excerpt: 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.