Category: ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY

Anti-business, Central planning, Cities, Developmental state, Differentiated products, Economic freedom, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Emigration/Immigration, Enterprise density, Enterprise friendly environment, Enterprise regularities, Enterprise richness, Entrepreneurial space, Export-led growth, Free State, Immigration/Emigration, KwaZulu-Natal, Large towns, Municipal efficiency, Population size, Predictive capabilities, Spontaneous order, State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), Trading services, Urban economy and growth

The City of Surreal Ramaphosa on the banks of the Rubicon

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

Cyril Ramaphosa’s vision of “a first post-apartheid city with skyscrapers, schools, universities and factories” (if implemented) has all the potential of becoming a disastrous social engineering experiment wasting resources on a massive scale. Not because the idea of a new city is wrong per se, but simply because the president is ideologically wedded to state-led development, holding a very negative view of the role of the private sector.

Ramaphosa doesn’t consider the private sector as efficient or more effective than the public sector, despite the fact that State-owned enterprises are mismanaged, bankrupt and a drag on economic development with Denel and the SABC even struggling to meet salary commitments.

Peas of the same pod

The creation of such a city is, in the Ramaphosa framework, not a vision of dynamic economic growth, but an ideological blinkered perspective of how government can improve society. Ramaphosa and all the social engineers within the ANC are, in that sense, not far from the approach of Hendrik Verwoerd. The National Party was, just like the ANC, a force pursuing transformation through prescription and limitation of choices.

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Central planning, Credit risk ratings, Developmental state, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Opportunity tax, State Capture

When CR’s 1001 Nights’ fables equal your nightmares

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

Instead of a State of the Nation Address brimming with details about the “extraordinary measures” required to realise Vision 2030 or the “difficult choices that will not please everyone” in order to get the economy growing again, president Cyril Ramaphosa’s SONA 2019 Mark 2 was more like a story in the tradition of One Thousand and One Nights.

It was a missed opportunity.

Not as disastrous as PW Botha’s Rubicon speech of August 1985, but akin to it in the sense that the President doesn’t appear to grasp the dire economic circumstances and the drastic policy and execution mode changes required to address these.

The stories of A Thousand and One Nights originate from the virgin bride Scheherazade who staved off execution the morning after (a fate that befell numerous one night brides preceding her) by enthralling the Persian Shah-ryar through story-telling without divulging the conclusions. Shah-ryar then kept her alive in order to hear the conclusion the next night, just to be enthralled by another story that would not be concluded. SONA 2019 Mark 2 tried to work magic on South Africans, foreign investors and rating agencies by fable after fable without a hint of how this would be fulfilled.

Bullet trains or magic carpets?

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Anti-business, Black economic empowerment (BEE), Crime against business, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Emigration/Immigration, Enterprise friendly environment, Opportunity tax, Productive knowledge, State Owned Enterprises (SOEs)

From Leader to Laggard: the Brain Drain & SA’s slide to the bottom

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

Is South Africa’s ‘radical transformation‘ from a leader to a laggard in the upper middle-income countries the cause or the result of a brain drain? It is hard to tell.  What is certain, is that there is an extremely strong inverse correlation. 

In fact, it is so strong that one can use one statistic to deduce the other. And if high-skilled emigration is going to continue, the country’s decline towards the ranks of the lower middle-income countries will also continue.

Figure 1

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Anti-business, Black economic empowerment (BEE), Company tax, Crime against business, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Enterprise friendly environment, Enterprise profitability, Enterprise research, data and statistics, Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Small enterprises, SME, Township enterprises, White monopoly capital theory

Small enterprise: the canary in the coal mine of a toxic business environment

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

Small enterprise in South Africa is unimportant for the Government. Whilst there is lip service to creating conducive conditions for small enterprise, the Government ignores the reality of small formal firms disappearing at an alarming rate. Small enterprise is the canary in the coal mine of a toxic business environment:  they die off first before the toxic conditions are lethal for large businesses.

Big Government favours Big Business (for tax income) or Big Labour (watering its socialist roots to ensure worker class loyalties). Small business cannot fulfil either these roles.  The demise of small formal enterprises in South Africa (as recorded in SARS data) is indicative of an utter indifference by Government to the plight of small enterprise.

That raises two questions:

  • Is the demolition of the small formal enterprise environment a strategy by Government to achieve its objective of radical racial economic transformation?
  • Is it also a strategy to plug a hole in the leaking SARS ship since, from a VAT perspective, businesses with a turnover below R1 million is a drain on Treasury?

Based on SARS data on Value Added Tax (VAT) covering the years 2007/8 to 2017/18 the devastation on micro and small businesses with a turnover of R1 million or less, is evident.  The number of VAT vendors in this bracket declined by 49% from 300 299 in 2007/8 to 154 559 in 2017/18. 

145 740 small enterprises gone…

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Anti-business, Company tax, Competitiveness, Construction services, Crime against business, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Enterprise friendly environment, Enterprise profitability, Financial services, Investment/Divestment, Large enterprises, Real estate services, Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Small enterprises, Trading services

SA lost 83 000 companies in the financial & business sector in 10 years

Johannes Wessels@

@johannesEOSA1

The landscape of incorporated South Africa in the financial and business services sector has changed dramatically: in 2007 a total of 222 532 companies in this sector submitted tax returns, but SARS Company Income Tax (CIT) data show by 2016 this figure had shrunk to 139 664: a 37% decline.

The CIT data base records a decline by almost 83 000 incorporated firms.  What happened?

This sector includes banks, money lenders, short term insurance firms and independent brokers, investment advisors, business consulting firms as well as real estate services. Figure 1 shows how the number of firms were relatively stable from 2007 to 2010 before a rapid decline before stabilising again from 2014 onwards.

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Company tax, Competitiveness, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Enterprise friendly environment, Enterprise profitability, Expropriation without compensation, Financial services, Large enterprises, Medium sized enterprises, Small and medium enterprises (SMEs)

SA enterprise sector critically ill

Johannes Wessels

@johannesEOSA1

The formal South African Enterprise Sector is critically ill. Were the company tax returns of the 768 000 companies combined and submitted as that of a single entity (say SA Amalgamated (Pty) Ltd) there would not have been any Company Income Tax (CIT) payable to SARS for three consecutive tax years.

SARS data on Company Income Tax (CIT) confirms the private sector is in a dismal state. In the tax years 2014 – 2016 assessed joint losses of all companies surpassed joint taxable income by R445 billion.

SARS data on CIT from 2007 to 2016 on assessed CIT returns bring the following to the fore (see Figure 1 below):

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