Ethiopia Investment Prospects: A Sectoral Scan

Abstract

Ethiopia is in the midst of a sustained growth surge that is becoming increasingly broad-based, building on major improvements in educational attainment, improved health outcomes, and infrastructure capacity in terms of access to power, transportation and telecommunications. The Government’s Growth and Transformation Plan sets ambitious targets for further improvements in these areas, together with significant reforms aiming to improve trade logistics, including through the roll-out of the authorized economic operator program across the growing number of export-oriented industry parks and a major improvement in the main export corridor to Djibouti. This industrialization push is taking place at a time when global trends are coming together to provide Ethiopia an opportunity to integrate its economy into the modern “Made in the World” system of production, including by attracting some of the labor-intensive production that is currently migrating out of China and other East Asian economies as wage rates rise in those regions. This paper considers Ethiopia’s prospects to succeed in this endeavor. It provides a brief overview of Ethiopia’s investment prospects at the macroeconomic level, including a macro scan of overall economic management and performance indicators and a horizontal scan of the framework for investment. It then summarizes the investment prospects in several major sectors of the economy in light of Ethiopia’s emerging capacities and the global developments: agriculture, mining, oil & gas, economic infrastructure, manufacturing, and selected services, including health and tourism.