ABSTRACT
Uganda since the early 1990s has been one of the most successful African examples of economic liberalization, attaining macroeconomic stability and reducing policy-induced anti-export bias in its trade policy in the 1990s. Taxes on exports have been abolished, and import protection has been reduced considerably. It now has one of the most open trade regimes in Africa. In conjunction with trade liberalization, the government has liberalized much of the agricultural sector, notably coffee marketing, and this has been associated with increased prices and incomes for producers. Growth performance has been impressive. In rough terms, real per capita GDP doubled by the early 2000s compared to the early 1990s. Export growth, especially coffee in the mid-1990s but including nontraditional exports more recently, made a significant contribution to this growth performance; export earnings doubled in real terms during the 1990s. The evidence of successive household surveys is that poverty is being reduced, fuelled by increased agricultural incomes for most of the 1990s (first coffee, then food crops since 1997) and increasing non-farm incomes in recent years. The percentage of the population recorded as living below the poverty line (the poverty headcount measure) fell by some 20 per cent between 1992 and 1998, and has continued to fall until the early 2000s, when it appears to have stabilized.
