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
Nicola Wills
By leveraging closed and abandoned coal mines as assets rather than liabilities, it may be possible to generate employment and support economic diversification without displacing local communities.
Whitney Matli
South Africa has significant export potential that it is not fully realising. Our analysis of the country’s trade markets reveals opportunities for increased exports through better market intelligence and strategic initiatives. This analysis investigates South Africa’s export performance by market, identifies gaps between the actual and potential exports, and highlights key opportunities for growth. This article explores these opportunities and the challenges that need to be addressed to enhance the country’s export performance.
Andrew Donaldson
South Africa’s finance minister tabled a Budget on 21 May with the support of the Government of National Unity partners. VAT will remain at 15 per cent and Cabinet is agreed that reviews of expenditure should be intensified. The revised budget protects frontline services though several provisional spending proposals have been withdrawn. But the problems of sluggish growth and high debt levels remain. Substantial spending cuts will be needed if the Treasury’s fiscal consolidation goals are to be achieved. More rapid growth will require far-reaching structural and fiscal reforms.
Nyemwererai Matshaka
Innovation has the potential to drive inclusive economic growth and reduce income inequality, yet, in South Africa, persistent gaps in R&D funding, patent accessibility, and unequal skills development limit its benefits. It is imperative for the government to review policy guidelines and make clear funding commitments to promote the equitable uptake of innovative technologies for wealth creation.
Articles
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