Economy
Gaborone is the center of the national economy. The headquarters of important financial institutions such as the Bank of Botswana, Bank Gaborone, BancABC, and the Botswana Stock Exchange are located downtown, as well as the headquarters for Air Botswana, Consumer Watchdog, Botswana Telecommunications Corporation, and Debswana, the joint diamond mining venture between De Beers and the Botswana government. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has its headquarters in Gaborone; the organization was formed in 1980 to increase economic cooperation among its members and reduce dependence on South Africa.
Several international companies have invested in the city: Hyundai, IBM, Daewoo, Volvo, Owens-Corning, and Siemens. Orapa House, owned by Debswana, is where the diamonds mined from Debswana are sorted and valued. Orapa House, located at the intersection of Khama Crescent and Nelson Mandela Drive, has a unique style of architecture that allows the perfect amount of indirect sunlight to shine through the windows in order to accurately sort diamonds. The Botswana Resource Conference is held annually at the Gaborone International Conference Centre.
The unemployment rate in Gaborone is 11.7% as of 2008. 19.7% of the population in Gaborone is employed in the financial sector.
According to Mercer's 2011 Worldwide Cost of Living Survey, Gaborone has the 195th highest cost of living for expatriates in the world, up from 203rd in 2010. Gaborone comes between Chennai, India and Quito, Ecuador. Gaborone is the fourth least expensive city for expatriates in Africa, coming in above Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at 211th, Kampala, Uganda at 202nd and Windhoek, Namibia at 198th.
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Famous quotes containing the word economy:
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—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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