ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS – Page 12

Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), Anti-business, Corruption, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Investment/Divestment, Job creation and unemployment, Local economic development (LED), Pro-growth strategies, State Capture

State Capture disguises the devastation by anti-business policies: Bafana-Bafana fared better than the economy

The anger because of billions lost through corruption and state capture comes at an enormous opportunity cost. The focus on the Zuma-Gupta-axis acts as blinkers that prevent a focus on the massive cost of adhering to failing economic policies and strategies – a cost far greater than the billions swindled away through corruption.

Three figures show clearly that the economic malaise is much deeper than the damage caused by corruption parasites and that the impact of poor policies started long before corruption landed under Government privilege at Waterkloof. Blaming the economic ills of South Africa on State Capture is a massive over-simplification.

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ECONOMIC THEORY, Enterprise dynamics, Enterprise regularities, Enterprise research, data and statistics, Tourism & hospitality services

The other side of the ‘tourism coin’

The 2015 Statistics South Africa report on tourism¹ concentrates on information about travellers, e.g. their numbers and origins, but does not provide any information about tourism and hospitality (T&H) enterprises in South Africa, e.g. their numbers or locations. Neither do the 2015/16 Annual Report of the Department of Tourism² and the 2016 Report of the World Tourism Organization³ provide such information. Something is lacking in the tourism scene of South Africa.

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Agriculture, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Free State, Job creation and unemployment, Medium sized enterprises

The ‘cigarettes and whisky conundrum’ and the advice of the Red Queen

The Red Queen said to Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” ¹ This advice also seems to hold for the cigarettes and whisky conundrum of South African communities.

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CITIES, TOWNS AND SETTLEMENTS, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Enterprise dynamics, Enterprise regularities, Local economic development (LED), Population size, Pro-poor strategies, Spending power (wealth/poverty)

Is a pro-poor LED stance justified?

Nel and Rogerson (2016) reviewed Local Economic Development (LED) policy and practice in South Africa. They reported that results have been modest despite the significant support for nearly 20 years put into applied local economic development. They suggested that a potential over-focus on pro-poor local economic development at the expense of simultaneously working with the private sector on pro-market interventions, could be a stumbling block to the potential success of LED.

Mason (2018) stated that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon and the condition of poverty often entails one or more of these realities: a lack of income (joblessness); a lack of preparedness (education); and a dependency on government services (welfare).

I asked if our research on enterprise dynamics that reported a wide range of regularities in the enterprise structures and dynamics of South African towns and municipalities (some of which have already been discussed here) could help to shed light on a question whether a pro-poor LED stance might be justified.

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Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA), Anti-business, Anti-poor, Black economic empowerment (BEE), Business incubation, Cooperatives, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Enterprise friendly environment, Informal businesses, Job creation and unemployment, Land reform, Preferential procurement

Cyril on a tight-rope: Paradox, not policy certainty the outcome of the ANC conference

Will the honeymoon breathing space of optimism that the worst corruption is over and that more business-friendly policies and better public spending behaviour be utilised or wasted? With new reports of the ANC’s national executive committee setting wheels in motion to recall Zuma as president, it is important to note that acting against Zuma would still not set enterprise friendly policies in place.

South Africa’s post-apartheid ANC policies and strategies dealing with enterprise development have been largely driven by an increasingly unfriendly framework for established businesses as well as an anti-growth premise. In the final gasps of December 2017, the ANC Conference even took unanimously policy positions that makes mockery of Ramaphosa’s utterances of making growth the priority.

The decisions to endorse Zuma’s announcement on free tertiary education and to change the Constitution to enable expropriation without compensation, provide ample proof the ANC doesn’t understand what is required to ensure growth and to step back from the fiscal cliff.

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Construction services, Culture and development, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Job creation and unemployment, Professional services, Religion and economics/Ideology and economics

The economic consequences of Luther: Ideas have legs, but some come with leg-irons

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

500 Years after Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenburg, Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman saved their theses to the internet: Beliefs have economic consequences.

Old news, one might say, recalling Weber. But Weber’s thesis was always contested: assumptions of cultural traits based on unreliable statistics from the 19th C. Cantoni, Dittmar and Yuchtman (further-on Cantoni and co.) offer hard micro-statistical evidence from the century when Luther protested against Papal authority : 1517 was a watershed year in how people viewed the world and those (world)views had economic consequences.

In a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper of October 2017 they state: “the pre-Reformation era can be understood as an equilibrium in which a monopolist religious producer (the Catholic Church) provided political legitimacy to secular authorities at a high price—charged in the form of control over resources, tax exemptions, and some degree of political power. The Reformation represented a competitive shock in the market for salvation. Protestant reformers offered a popular, lower-cost alternative to the Catholic Church… This had implications for the allocation of resources between secular and religious uses…”

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