The Second Great Zimbabwe Economic Journal · Entry 70
Zimbabwe’s US$66 Billion Economy: The Number Nearly Doubled — So Why Doesn’t It Feel Like It?
The economy has been remeasured — and it is now put at around US$66 billion, roughly double the figure of a few years ago. A refreshed ruler and real growth are both good news. But a bigger number is not yet a bigger life. Here is what the figure shows, and what it hides.
A number is a tool, and like any tool it belongs to whoever holds it and answers to whatever it was built to measure. So when Zimbabwe’s measured economy is suddenly reported at around US$66 billion — where only a few years ago the figure was closer to US$30–44 billion — the first question an honest economist asks is not “are we twice as rich?” It is: what changed — the country, or the ruler?
The honest answer is: a bit of both, and that is worth saying plainly. The national statistics agency, ZIMSTAT, rebased the way it measures the economy — moving the base year from 2023 to 2025. Rebasing is not a trick; it is good statecraft. Every serious economy refreshes its measuring stick so the data reflect today’s industries, not a frozen past. Credit where it is due: better numbers are the foundation of better planning.
But a measuring tape that reads a longer number has not lengthened the cloth. In current prices the economy leapt from about US$32bn (2024) to US$59.7bn (2025) — while real, inflation-adjusted growth was 8.3%. The gap between those two figures is the whole story.
Eight-point-three percent is a genuinely strong year — among the better growth rates on the continent, lifted by a good harvest and firm gold and lithium prices (see Entries 68 and 69). That is real, and this Institute celebrates it. The task now is simply to keep the household in view while the headline number climbs, and to ask the question that matters most on this plateau: not how big the number is, but whose it is.
What the figures say
A number that nearly doubled — and an economy that grew 8.3%
The measured economy, climbing fast
GDP in current (US$) prices
The jump reflects three things at once: a refreshed base year (2023 → 2025), high domestic inflation, and real growth. Only the last is more goods and services. Source: ZIMSTAT via Equity Axis, Jun 2026; The Zimbabwe Mail, 21 Oct 2026.
The headline vs the harvest
Change from 2024 to 2025 — the number on paper vs real output
Nominal GDP in local currency rose about 88% while real output grew 8.3%. Most of the headline increase is inflation, not new goods. Source: ZIMSTAT via Equity Axis, 2026.
What the economy is actually made of
Largest sectors, share of GDP, 2025
These five sectors are more than 60% of the economy. Agriculture grew fastest in 2025 (+27.9%) — welcome, but weather-dependent. Source: ZIMSTAT via Equity Axis, 2026.
The honest ledger
Six things a bigger GDP does not tell you
GDP is a fine servant and a poor master. It measures the size of economic activity in a year — not who owns it, not who keeps it, and not whether a single household ate better. Before anyone frames US$66 billion as arrival, hold it against what the figure cannot see.
What US$66 billion leaves out
The questions this Institute puts to any headline number:
- It counts activity, not ownership.
- It counts value added, not value retained — a mine can boom while the profit sails abroad.
- It is an average; it cannot see the household or the hungry.
- It rises with prices, not only with production.
- It flatters ratios: a bigger GDP shrinks debt-to-GDP without touching one dollar of the debt.
- It measures this year’s noise, not whether we built anything that lasts.
That second point is the thread running through this whole journal. Our lithium is now the number-one export; our gold is having a record year. Both swell GDP. But as Entries 68 and 69 showed, the value can still leave — up the chain, or out the back door. Value sovereignty is not measured in the size of the economy. It is measured in how much of it stays, and whose hands it stays in. A rebasing cannot answer that. Only ownership can.
The way forward
Use the better ruler to build, not to boast
1. Measure what matters alongside GDP. Publish, as prominently as the headline figure, what households actually feel: real wages, formal jobs created, poverty, and — this Institute’s own metric — value retained from our minerals and crops.
2. Do not let a statistic stand in for transformation. A refreshed number is not a new factory. The economy still rests heavily on mining and a weather-dependent harvest; the work of industrialising and diversifying is unchanged by the rebasing.
3. Be honest about the ratios. If a larger GDP makes debt-to-GDP look gentler, say so plainly — the debt is the same size as yesterday. Credibility is itself an economic asset.
4. Bank the good year. 8.3% growth, firm commodity prices and a good harvest are a surplus moment. Surpluses that are invested in capacity compound; surpluses that are consumed vanish — and the next drought or price fall arrives all the same.
Tete’s Take
Let me be fair before I am sharp, because both are owed. ZIMSTAT did the right and overdue thing: it refreshed how the nation measures itself, and the statisticians who did that quiet, unglamorous work deserve the credit rarely given to people who count for a living. And the growth beneath the number is real — a strong harvest, a mining upswing, an 8.3% year many countries would envy.
But we are a people who have been handed impressive numbers about ourselves before, by others, to prove points that the household never felt. So we hold two truths at once: the economy grew, and the average Zimbabwean is not twice as well off as three years ago. Both are true. A journal that tells you only the first is a brochure; one that tells you only the second is a complaint. This is neither.
The plateau that built Great Zimbabwe did not measure its wealth to impress a visitor. It measured to build — granaries, walls, trade that lasted centuries. Let US$66 billion be a ruler we build with, not a number we hide behind.
Not how big the number is. Whose it is.
Tovera Mudzimu Dzoka
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