By MAIMBOLWA MULIKELELA in Washington DC –
THE International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called for economic diversification and structural transformation to ensure strong and durable growth in view of low copper prices.

. Sayeh

IMF director in charge of Africa  Antoinette Sayeh said it was important for countries like Zambia to speed up their diversification agenda and structural transformation to ensure strong and durable growth.
This will help alleviate the external shocks arising from high commodity prices.
Addressing journalists in Washington DC, Ms Sayeh said this required striking an appropriate balance between scaling up outlays on human capital and infrastructure development and avoiding an unsustainable public debt built-up.
“From a more medium-term perspective, the current commodity price shock is also a powerful reminder of the need to make more rapid progress towards economic diversification and structural
transformation,” she said.
Ms Sayeh, however, said the drop in oil prices provided a unique opportunity to advance politically-difficult energy subsidy reforms across the region.
She said the sub-Saharan Africa’s economic outlook remained favourable and the region was set to register another year of solid performance.
“Indeed the region’s economy is expected to expand at 4.5 per cent in 2015 and will continue being one of the fastest-growing regions in the world, in fact second only to emerging and developing Asia,” Ms Sayeh said.
Ms Sayeh said that economic expansion this year would be at the lower end of the range experienced in the recent years.
“This mainly reflects the impact of the sharp decline of the oil and commodity prices that we have witnessed over the last six months.
“However, as always for a region with so much diversity, the effect of this shock will highly be heterogeneous across the region,” Ms Sayeh said.