Resource information
Liberia aims to achieve middle-income
status by 2030 through broad participation and inclusive
growth. The Government's growth strategy aims to
accelerate growth through the exploitation of natural
resources, while maintaining sound macroeconomic policies,
improving the business environment, and prudently allocating
aid and commodity-based financing resources to expand
infrastructure and formal sector employment. However,
Liberia's experience with rapid growth in the 1960s and
1970s, that benefit a small percentage of the population,
followed by economic collapse, widespread poverty and social
unrest, and civil war, has made policymakers acutely aware
that the quality of the growth process is at least as
important as the rate of growth. Now that peace has been
established and growth is once again on an upward trend,
with the reactivation of the iron ore and agriculture
sectors, and prospects for oil, promising opportunities for
significant growth in the medium to long term, the
Government wants to ensure that Liberia's growth over
the next two decades will be sustainable and equitable. A
key objective of the growth strategy is to avoid the traps
posed by dependence on primary resources while creating the
basis for economic diversification and employment
generation, and providing opportunities and training so that
individuals across the country can partake in the growth
process. This diagnostic aims to support that strategy by
identifying the factors in Liberia's economy that act
as binding constraints to inclusive growth.
