Our research has long revealed a close correlation between economic growth, job creation, family income levels, and confidence in the government. Between 1994 and 2003 South Africa averaged GDP growth rates of around 3%. Between 2004 and 2007 that number picked up to over 5%.
Latest from the IRR
We have much experience of studying ANC policy documents and find the most recent set of nine documents interesting, in the sense that some of the more rabid Marxist dogma has been very clearly toned down, while flashes of economic common sense shine through here and there.
Black companies will benefit from contracts swung their way. The lucky ones will get paid on time. Many will struggle, the minister of public works, Thulas Mxesi, having recently admitted that late payment by government entities "is still a big issue".
Mike Berger (Trump and the crisis of the West, Politicsweb, 15 February 2017) refers to “a growing constituency in academia and the media focused mainly on a limitless smorgasbord of 'minority rights' and Western guilt for all manner of internal and global ills… such arguments [having] powerfully reinforced virulent ethnic and ideological identity politics in an increasing spiral of polarisation.”
The Institute of Race Relations report on immigrants in South Africa has for the most part been accurately reported as a glimpse into the economic lives of South Africa’s immigrants; the odds they face and the success they have forged despite, but perhaps because of, hardship. However there is often someone willing to take up the role of a sleuth with a preconceived narrative, combing the report for words that will make his analysis stick. By GWEN NGWENYA for the South African Institute of Race Relations. 4
In 2012 Mr Mantashe echoed this concern, saying it was ‘unacceptable’ for the government to pay R20m for a school that could have been built for R5m, or R27 for a bottle of water that normally cost only R7.
There has, quite appropriately, been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over South Africa's lamentable performance in the Fraser Institute's survey of the enabling environment for mining investment. In terms of one of the Institute's two indices – ‘policy perceptions’ – South Africa is the third worst performer on the African continent.
What will South Africa lose if all immigrants are sent home?
13 March 2017 – Most refugees and immigrants who come to South Africa seeking a better life, manage to do so. This report investigates how they achieve the seemingly impossible and what South Africans can learn from this.
What is President Jacob Zuma's government up to with land reform? Not only Mr Zuma, but also his minister of rural development and land reform, Gugile Nkwinti, have on several occasions this year spoken of restitution without compensation. The deputy minister of public service and administration, Ayanda Dlodlo, has done the same.
For centuries, African territories were subject to colonial authorities, for whom growing capital markets was not a priority. More recently,
Suid-Afrika op ’n naaldpunt oor die grond-kwessie, en boere kan alles verloor, meen dr. Frans Cronjé.
During his state-of-the-nation address a month ago President Jacob Zuma declared that "mining has always been the backbone of our economy". Speaking in October 2013 at the opening of an extension of the Venetia diamond mine operated by De Beers in the north of Limpopo, he said mining was "poised for growth and expansion".
SA’s absorption rate is just more than 40%. This is about 20 percentage points below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average
The ANC is now basking in widespread public approval for having thus faced the EFF down. Behind the scenes, however, it is still seeking to find ways to take land and other property without paying compensation and (supposedly) without breaching the Constitution.
We are in the earliest days of a grand experiment to test the validity of the notion that the businessman’s dispassionate acumen can transform our sclerotic federal government into something with private sector efficiency.’
IRR calls for extension of ICC submission deadline
1 March 2017 – The IRR has today written to the Portfolio Committee on Justice and Correctional Services to make the point that the time afforded for submissions on the proposed Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act Repeal Bill is too short.
'Many politicians and analysts don’t like to hear it but the government has maxed out the economy’s revenue-creating capacity'
Few of last week's numerous newspaper articles commemorating the tragic sinking of the SS Mendi off the English coastline near the Isle of Wight on 21st February 1917 failed to mention that the African servicemen who lost their lives in the First World War had been treated by the then government as second class
Government is on the brink of fiscal catastrophe – IRR report
22 February 2017 – IRR COO Gwen Ngwenya said the budget presented by the Minister of Finance yesterday suggested “a government at the brink of fiscal catastrophe and without a plan for either growth or austerity”.
A related point is that government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has increased from 26.4% in 1994/95 to a projected 33% in 2017/18. By international standards this is a very high level. Our data on the subject extends back to the 1960s and the current level is the highest on record.
Unlike Ramaphosa and his team at Davos, Zwane fails to inspire confidence at Mining Indaba, writes David Christianson
Yet the minister failed to soothe investor concerns reflecting the government’s broader inability to stage a growth recovery.
The risk of the new minimum wage is that it is going to reduce levels of labour market absorption and participation while raising inflation and undermining entrepreneurship and economic growth.
If anyone needed more evidence that quitting the European Union (EU) was the right decision for the United Kingdom (UK), the German chancellor and her finance minister recently provided it.
Yet another commodity boom might pass us by
16 February 2017 – The unexpected uptick in commodity prices should provide a great boost to South Africa's mining industry, says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) in a paper published yesterday.
Various threats of violence against whites were also reported. Velaphi Khumalo, an employee of the Gauteng provincial administration, tweeted that whites should be ‘hacked and killed like Jews’ and their children ‘used as garden fertiliser’. Other comments by black South Africans called for whites to be ‘poisoned and killed’, urged ‘the total destruction of white people’, and advocated a civil war in which ‘all white people would be killed’.
Mining does not get the credit it deserves for its contribution to the South African economy
15 February 2017 – South Africa's mining industry must start blowing its own trumpet. The mining sector does not get the credit it deserves for its contribution to the South African economy, says a paper published today by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).
'The ‘third force’ narrative's most explosive assumption – an organised, high-level plot – proved untenable'
The previous government, as this column observed last week citing a remark by James Myburgh, was not "hallucinogenic" about communist penetration of the African National Congress (ANC).
To get higher levels of growth, South Africa needs investment. That will not happen if entrepreneurs are held up as villains who cause other people to be poor.