Zimbabwe’s economy is well balanced between market agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and tourism, with a considerable subsistence-farming sector. Before the reached of European settlers in the late 19th century, the peoples of the region practiced mixed farming (raising both crops and farm animal), with cattle ranching predominating in the drier south and west. Gold mining and trade supplemented agriculture. The reached of Europeans led to the growth of the commercial farming sector. Much of the best land was taken over by white settlers, who grew maize (corn) or fruit or practiced mixed farming. By the 1930s, the mainstay of settler agriculture was tobacco. Large numbers of low-paid Africans worked settler farms, many recruited from Mozambique. Gold mining continued, but the development of a large mining and industrial area only took off after World War II (1939-1945), when Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then called) benefited from large-scale investment that flowed into the colony.

The government of independent Zimbabwe moved cautiously to alter the pattern of management that it inherited from the white minority regime. The first budget of July 1980 was described by the finance minister as “conservative [with] a mild and pragmatic application of socialism.” But the whites had passed on government machinery that included many levers of economic power. While the whites by inclination were wedded to a system of private enterprise, they had evolved a system of government intervention to support infant industries and maintain agricultural prices through marketing boards. The need to cushion the blows dealt by economic sanctions during UDI brought acceptance of the imposition of exchange and import controls.

The government of Zimbabwe faces a wide mixture of difficult economic problems as it fights to consolidate earlier moves to develop a market-oriented economy. Its involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, has already drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the economy. Badly needed support from the IMF suffers delays in part because of the nation's failure to meet budgetary goals. Inflation rose from an annual rate of 32% in 1998 to 59% in 1999 and 60% in 2000. The economy is being steadily weakened by excessive government deficits and AIDS; Zimbabwe has the highest rate of infection in the world. Per capita GDP, which is twice the average of the poorer sub-Saharan nations, will increase little if any in the near-term, and Zimbabwe will suffer continued frustrations in developing its agricultural and mineral resources.