By Aaron Maasho
Tue Jul 22, 2014
ADDIS ABABA – Ethiopia should consider devaluing its currency to boost exports as they are mostly unprocessed products and need to stay competitive on price, a World Bank economist said on Tuesday.
Ethiopia, whose main exports are coffee, horticultural products, oilseeds and livestock, has operated a carefully managed floating exchange rate regime since 1992.
The last big devaluation was in 2010 when the birr lost 16.7 percent of its value to the dollar. The central bank quoted the birr at 19.6511/19.8476 to the U.S. currency on Tuesday.
“By one measure of real exchange rate, Ethiopia’s currency is 31 percent overvalued,” the World Bank’s lead economist in Ethiopia, Lars Christian Moller, said in Addis Ababa.
At an event to launch an economic report on the Horn of Africa nation, he said devaluing the currency by 10 percent could increase export growth by 5 percentage points a year.
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