Growth Policy for Dummies
A recent working paper by Nicholas Crafts – Creating Competitive Advantage: Policy Lessons from History – should be compulsory reading for any South African politician, bureaucrat, journalist, student, trade unionist or anyone vaguely affiliated with policy-making in South Africa. Let me rephrase that: at least the first four pages of this paper should be compulsory reading for anyone working for South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, Treasury and the Department of Economic Development.
Why? Because it gets to the heart of what a government can do to help grow an economy (and, consequently, improve the lives of its citizens). And also why – even if we know what to do and how to do it – it probably won’t happen. I’ll quote liberally.
To read further click on the following link.
Remaphobia and Post-Apartheid Economics
Why Nations Fail authors, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, have recently written a series of blog posts on South Africa. One of these, The Fear of Oligarchy, argues that the “African National Congress (ANC) were so concerned that alienating the white elite would be very costly, they ended up with a society even more unequal than the one they inherited”. They argue – using a mind map that link prominent black politicians to private sector firms – that “white capital” gave the ANC political elite a stake in the private enterprise economy. “Perhaps the major driver of the lack of effective reform in the extractive economic institutions of Apartheid is not just that the ANC elite were fearful of collapse but also because they started seeing their personal interests in the continuation of the same economic institutions.”
This is reminiscent of professor Sampie Terreblanche’s views of the “secret meetings” that took place at the CODESA negotiations to end Apartheid, in which white capital absorbed the black political elite to protect their own interests. The high inequality today, Terreblanche argue, is a result of the black elite selling out to the greed and selfishness of “neo-liberal democratic capitalism”.
To read further click on the following link.
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