| Last month Adriano Maleiane, Mozambique's central bank governor, announced the Banco de Moçambique's latest estimates for the country's GDP growth in 1999. Mozambique's economy, he said, grew at a world-beating 10% last year. That gives this former Portuguese colony in southern Africa three years in a row of double-digit growth rates and almost certainly the world's highest rate of economic growth last year. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that this rapid growth has been achieved at a time of fast-falling inflation. The central bank has brought down the rate of inflation, which stood at around 50% in the mid-1990s, to an average of 2% in 1999. With such spectacular macroeconomic headlines, one might have expected Mozambique to be attracting the attention of a whole host of emerging-market investment specialists. The reason it is not is that this remains one of the world's poorest countries - sky-high GDP growth is rather easier to achieve from a rock-bottom base. Mozambique's devastating civil war ended only eight years ago. Its industrial base is embryonic and its financial infrastructure is virtually non-existent. The view of one London-based emerging-markets specialist is typical. |