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Conrad Mwanawashe Business Reporter
ZIMBABWE should migrate to value added exports from primary product exports to stop the weakening economic growth and improve liquidity in the system.

Presenting a paper titled: Situational Analysis of the Trading/ Export Environment at the ZimTrade’s Annual Exporters’ Conference yesterday, Zimbabwe Economic Policy Analysis and Research Unit executive director Dr Gibson Chigumira said there is need to focus more on manufactured exports.

He said there is a relationship between export performance and economic growth.

“The under-performance of exports has serious implications on growth,” said Dr Chigumira.

He said value added exports should be at the core of the economy and this will help halt the weakening growth. To achieve growth in exports, there is need for innovative thinking on how to incentivise exports.

“Exporters need to be incentivised. Our exports are dominated by primary products which means we have not migrated from primary product exports to value added exports,” he said.

Last year 60 percent of exports were predominantly primary exports, agriculture and minerals.

“We need to change that matrix and focus more on manufactured exports,” he said.

He said Zimbabwean exporters should take advantage of opportunities in the region by manufacturing products that unique.

“If you check in the region you will see that countries are more or less selling the same thing from a primary product point of view. What only differentiates us is manufactured exports and that is an area where we are not performing well,” said Dr Chigumira.

He said growing manufactured exports will reduce the import bill which is currently higher than the export bill meaning that Zimbabwe is consuming more of foreign savings than it is generating domestic savings locally.

“What are we importing? Because we can import finished products or intermediate products for manufacturing and re-exporting but if we are importing finished products then there is a challenge and we are not being strategic.”

“We need to import intermediate products which we can re-process and re-export for us to achieve the vision of transforming this economy to be an exporter of high value manufactured exports,” said Dr Chigumira.

Growing exports will also improve liquidity in the system.

The ZimTrade conference was running under the theme “Building Enterprise Competitiveness for Export”.

ZimTrade chief executive officer Ms Sithembile Pilime said the focus of the discussions was designed to raise the necessary awareness on the need to address the administrative and regulatory challenges which continue to impede exports.