South Africa's alcohol taxation system requires urgent strengthening to address the devastating public health burden of harmful alcohol consumption. While National Treasury's proposed tiered excise structure represents progress, its thresholds are misaligned with current market realities and unlikely to reduce consumption. To effectively reduce alcohol-related harm, REEP proposes narrower tax tiers, higher uplift factors, and predictable above-inflation tax increases.
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Pippa Green
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Mahlatse Mabeba
Zak Essa, Kate Philip, Mapaseka Setlhodi, Mokgadi Matuludi, Tshego Walker, Akosua Koranteng
Latest Articles
Andrew Donaldson
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council appointed last year has released its January Advisory Briefs. In support of South Africa’s G20 leadership, the Council focused on both global and domestic aspects of the transition to a green economy and fiscal debt issues. It has not yet brought its considerable expertise to bear on South Africa’s pressing investment, growth, employment and social development challenges.
Mahlatse Mabeba
What impact did South Africa’s nationwide curfew of December 2020 have on COVID-19 cases? The evidence, based on daily case data, shows a sharp and immediate decline in infections following the curfew’s implementation. The findings highlight the value of targeted restrictions, particularly when combined with alcohol bans, and offer policy lessons on timing, communication, and equity in designing effective public health interventions.
Thando Tenza
Village chickens are a pathway to alleviating poverty in resource-poor communities. Improvements to the informal poultry value chain, such as access to the market, commercialization, training, and land, would assist in improving food security.
Julia Tatham
Expanding access to electricity has been a major achievement of post-apartheid South Africa, yet affordability remains a persistent challenge for low-income households. To address this, the government introduced Free Basic Electricity (FBE) in 2003, offering 50 kWh of free electricity per month to indigent households. The study on which this article is based provides the first quantitative analysis of FBE’s effects on household welfare since its inception. We find receiving the FBE subsidy is associated with a shift towards clean cooking, investment in essential appliances, and small but significant improvements in literacy, writing, and numeracy. However, the subsidy does not yet reach all its intended beneficiaries: we indicate that institutional weaknesses need to be addressed alongside review of the value of the benefit.
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Editor's Corner
The latest editions of Econ3x3 feature two timely articles: one on the unemployment crisis – or as the writers put it the “crisis of missing jobs” - the other on the state of SA agriculture at a time when it is under threat by both domestic and foreign naysayers.
The first, by a group of writers associated with the public employment programmes, the Presidential Employment Stimulus and the Presidential Youth Employment Initiative, argue that many have approached the unemployment crisis - particularly youth unemployment – through a faulty lens. Fewer than three million jobs have been created since 2015 – a period when more than four million new jobseekers entered the labour market.
It is time to reframe the question: “An unemployment crisis tends to make us ask: what is wrong with the people who cannot find work? A crisis of missing jobs makes us ask: what is wrong with our society that it cannot create ways for people to contribute even though there is so much work to be done to make South Africa a better place to live in?”
Public employment programmes have been criticized as being an inadequate solution to the unemployment crisis. However, the writers argue, the “employment stimulus has shown… that the state and civil society have the capacity to create higher quality, better paid work that meets growing social and environmental needs..[and] provide work experience,… for a labour market that is unable to do so.”
Also timely, given the misinformation about the “targeting” of white farmers, is the measured article by Wandile Sihlobo about the state of South African agriculture.
Democracy has been good for the sector, he argues: it has more than doubled output since 1994 and last year the country was the 32nd-largest agricultural exporter world-wide. True, it faces serious challenges, including crime and inept municipalities; it is also true that land-reform projects have stumbled, largely due to the “inertia” of the Department of Land Reform and Rural Development.
But the big picture tells us that South African agriculture has “benefited from its connectivity with the world since 1994.” It is as much a message to domestic doomsayers as it is to foreign critics: “The stories we tell about ourselves and the country matter. They shape views domestically, and how others outside view us.”
Pippa Green