Friday Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe is expected to present to Parliament the 2017\/2018 national budget at a time when consumer confidence in the economy remains low.<\/p>\n
It also comes at a time when the private sector, considered the engine for development, is still bleeding riddled by high taxes and high cost of borrowing on the financial market.<\/p>\n
The development has forced some firms to downsize in a desperate attempt to survive while others have closed shop. This has ended up fuelling unemployment levels.<\/p>\n
With the country expected to record a bumper harvest this year, the weight of expectations seems to have shifted to job creation.<\/p>\n
In an interview, James Chirwa, a resident of Blantyre said he expects the Minister of Finance to provide solutions to the growing levels of unemployment in the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat Malawi is facing one of the worst levels of unemployment is not a secret. I hope the Finance Minister will provide clear strategies on how his government intends to create jobs in the short to medium term,\u201d Chirwa said<\/p>\n
Thirty-two year-old Mary Chindevu agreed with Chirwa that the country needs to start creating jobs again so that its youths become productive.<\/p>\n
Chindebvu said the current situation where millions of school leavers are just staying idle in their homes without any jobs is not ideal for any country.<\/p>\n
Economics Association of Malawi (Ecama) president, Henry Kachaje, said his association expects Gondwe to pump enough resources in areas that promote production rather than consumption.<\/p>\n
Kachaje said boosting production, especially in agriculture, would help create the much-needed jobs in industries, most of which are involved in agro processing.<\/p>\n
He further said Ecama expects the implementation of fair taxes which would help to grow industries rather than stifling them.<\/p>\n
Goodall hinted during a pre-budget consultation session held in Blantyre that he expects the 2017\/18 financial plan to be around K1.2 trillion, just like last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Friday Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe is expected to present to Parliament the 2017\/2018 national budget at a time when consumer confidence in the economy remains low. It also comes at a time when the private sector, considered the engine for development, is still bleeding riddled by high taxes and high cost of borrowing on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46672"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46684,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46672\/revisions\/46684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}