Running out of Road: South Africa’s public finances and what is to be done
28 August 2019
Over the past decade SA growth has been exceptionally disappointing and this has been accompanied by an astonishing build-up of public sector debt. Slow growth drove the rise in debt, which has now reached a point at which its weight is slowing growth.
This is the key conclusion of a new report titled Running out of Road: SA’s public finances and what is to be done, released earlier today by the Centre for Development and Enterprise.
Ann Bernstein, executive director of the CDE says: “SA is in a profound and deepening economic crisis. The country’s public finances are increasingly precarious, its macroeconomic fundamentals increasingly unsound, and the path we are on is increasingly unsustainable.”
Unless SA deals with its fiscal crisis, growth will not accelerate. But the opposite is also true: unless SA gets growth going it will not resolve its fiscal crisis, concludes the CDE report.