Democratic Republic of Congo's fragile post-war economic growth is being slowed by poor governance, a lack of transparency and heavy informal taxes on companies, the World Bank said on Thursday.
The vast central African country is the continent's second largest copper producer and has large resources of arable land, but remains mired in poverty after decades of dictatorship and back-to-back wars that left several million people dead.
Despite showing positive growth since the official end of fighting in 2003, continuing political instability and a lack of institutional reforms are a drag on economic expansion, the World Bank reported in the first detailed study of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 25 years.
"The analysis suggests that poor governance stifles the performance of small- and medium-sized enterprises in the formal sector," said the report, which used data up to 2010. "(This) enables public agencies and officials to impose myriad taxes and levies, both formal and informal, on the private sector."
via www.trust.org
You can't grow a viable economy without those small- and medium-sized companies.
Also, the poor implementation of the value-added-tax is going to hurt progress.
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