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.
Editor
Pippa Green
Latest Articles
Mahlatse Mabeba
Zak Essa, Kate Philip, Mapaseka Setlhodi, Mokgadi Matuludi, Tshego Walker, Akosua Koranteng
Latest Articles
Valentine Madzudzo
The South African government has extended several amnesties to immigrant workers from Zimbabwe. Using employment data from 2014 to 2022, we find that legalizing immigrant workers mostly led to job growth for both locals and immigrants. However, in 2018, some local workers in Cape Town’s CBD lost jobs to immigrants. Overall, though, the ZEP has helped integrate immigrants into the job market. Now the policy focus must be on enhancing employment opportunities.
Thembalethu Seti
South Africa's agricultural sector is characterized by a dualistic structure, with smallholder farmers struggling to integrate into the global value chain. Despite policies aimed at supporting smallholder farmers, implementation challenges and inadequate targeting of interventions hinder their effectiveness. This article examines the role of cooperatives in supporting smallholder maize farmers in South Africa, using the Eastern Cape as a case study. We recommend strengthening cooperative support programs, improving infrastructure and logistics, and enhancing access to finance and capacity-building initiatives, to improve the economic resilience of smallholder farmers and contribute to the broader growth of the agricultural sector.
Ihsaan Bassier
Why do women earn less than men? The usual suspects – occupation, hours, experience – explain some of it. But a powerful, often overlooked reason is simply this: where women work. The companies that hire them play a huge role in shaping their lifetime earnings.
Justin Visagie
Business churn is usually the sign of a healthy, growing economy. South Africa compares well globally in terms of firm turnover. The puzzle, though, is why these shifts have not been accompanied by more dynamic economic growth and job creation.
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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