More than half of Ethiopian economists surveyed by the Ethiopian Economics Association are not convinced that the birr’s market-based exchange rate will survive the next two to three years. Ethiopian Business Review reported on October 3 that 56.4 percent of the 266 experts polled in June 2026 described the outlook for the float as either uncertain, with a meaningful risk of partial reversal, or unlikely to hold, with significant controls expected to return. The report was authored by Ethiopian Economics Association senior researcher Naser Yenus Nuru.
Only 15 percent of respondents said the float is highly likely to be sustained without a major reversal, Ethiopian Business Review reported. Another 26.3 percent expect it to survive with occasional administrative interventions at the margin. Ethiopia moved to a market-determined exchange rate in July 2024. The association report warns that businesses and traders who price in the risk of a policy reversal or fresh depreciation can keep inflation elevated even if the policy itself stays in place.
Confidence in the birr as a store of value has worsened since the reforms, according to 70.7 percent of the experts in the survey, while only 3 percent said it had improved significantly. On the gap between official and parallel market rates, 44 percent of respondents said the gap has shrunk significantly but still exists, 30.1 percent said it is unchanged or wider, and just 9.4 percent said the rates have largely converged, Ethiopian Business Review reported.
Much of the doubt centres on the institutions meant to protect the reform. In addition, 52.3 percent see the National Bank of Ethiopia as largely not independent or effectively subordinate to fiscal objectives, compared with 5.6 percent who believe it exercises meaningful independence.
The doubts do not mean most experts want to reverse reform. Only 3.4 percent of respondents think the pace or sequencing of reforms should be reconsidered, even though 65.8 percent say tax and revenue measures under the International Monetary Fund-supported programme are adding noticeably to prices. Naser notes that most experts appear to accept those short-term costs as part of the fiscal adjustment needed for stability. The disagreement, he writes, is about whether the reforms will be kept up, not whether they were needed. The report’s advice is to keep the market rate, avoid a sudden reversal, and narrow the gap between the official rate and the parallel rate. Naser stresses that the views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the association’s official position, and that the survey captures only members who chose to respond.
Many households and small traders still change money through hawala and the parallel rate. People turn to hawala and informal foreign exchange because the published rate often does not reflect what dollars and euros actually cost in the street. A managed or half-managed rate is convenient for whoever can obtain hard currency at the official window and sell it at a premium. Crackdowns on hawala agents do not create dollars. They push the same transactions further underground and raise the cost of sending remittances home. If the authorities want a smaller black market, the path the reformers themselves describe is a float that is allowed to clear, with a National Bank of Ethiopia that can say no to fiscal financing, not a campaign that treats market-value exchange as a crime.
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