Recurring Themes in South Africa’s ‘Economic Strategies’

I knew these sounded familiar.

Every few years, some part of the South African government - sometimes the Treasury, sometimes the Presidency - puts out a new “economic strategy” for the country. These “strategies” are usually a collection of vague desires that sound agreeable, until you start to think about

• how are these things going to be achieved? are they feasible?
• how do these goals fit together? are they mutually consistent?
• are these desired ends even efficient? would they pass a cost-benefit test individually? collectively?

I’ve been around long enough to have heard several of them, and they all start sounding very similar. I was curious about how similar they actually were, so last December I went through each of the founding documents (at least, the executive summaries and introductions) and made the following table.

	RDP (1994)	GEAR (1996)	ASGISA (2006)	“Transformation, Growth, and Competitiveness” (2019)
macroeconomics
more redistribution in fiscal policy	✅	✅
reduce budget deficits	✅	✅
flexible exchange rates		✅	(1)
inflation targeting	✅	✅
tax incentives for new investments	✅	✅
restructuring of state assets		✅	✅
expansionary infrastructure spending	✅	✅	(2)	✅
trade policy
reduced tariffs on inputs	✅	✅
export promotion				✅
expanded regional trade	✅	✅		✅
industrial or competition policy
modernising network industries (rail, water, electricity, communications)	✅	✅	✅	✅
experimentation and monitoring of industrial policy				✅
lowering “barriers to entry”, “supporting” SMMEs			✅	✅
labour market policy
“strengthened levy system” to fund worker training		✅
subsidising inputs to agriculture and tourism	✅	✅	✅	✅
“addressing” shortages of skilled labour	✅		✅	✅

1. If anything, the opposite - ASGISA called for “less currency volatility”.
2. No explicit mention, but this was the Mbeki era of “expanded public works”.

One thing that stands out is that a bunch of the “macro” goals have actually been achieved - reduced budget deficits, flexible exchange rates, inflation targeting, more redistributive transfers - but none of the other ones. The tell, of course, is how often the same goals are re-announced. You might think continued failure to achieve a goal would prompt some hard conversations in Pretoria about whether the goal was unrealistic or where the major obstacles were, etc. For all I know, such conversations have happened, but as a whole, the government we have does not really execute on its plans; merely stating them is good enough.