Erschienen in:World Bank E-Library Archive Economic Updates and Modeling
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.1596/29677
Identifikator:
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
This report reviews South Africa's recent economic and social developments. It underlines that South Africa's current economic rebound may not be sustained if the fundamental factors undermining its growth potential are not boldly addressed. This includes in particular income inequality, which fuels resource contestation, policy uncertainty and scare private investors of seeing their investments overly taxed and expropriated. Nevertheless, inequalities are increasingly driven by labor markets developments, as opposed to race or location of origin. Policy actions could accelerate a projected decline in inequalities resulting from greater access to education. Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium, the report simulates a number of policy scenarios until 2030. Simulation results suggests that continuing to address corruption, restoring policy certainty in mining, improving the competitiveness of strategic state-owned enterprises, further exposing South Africa's large conglomerates to foreign competition, and facilitating skilled immigration would raise labor demand and create the fiscal space needed to eventually build labor supply from the poor population through education and spatial integration reforms. By 2030, extreme poverty could be almost eradicated and inequalities significantly reduced. And as inequalities decline, the social contract would strengthen and likely encourage further private investment - a possibility not captured in the simulations