The Covid Project — a research project to assess SA’s economic prospects after the pandemic — has concluded that the country’s growth plan is not working. More informed reforms are urgently needed.

The findings of the Covid Project — a series of independent papers commissioned from several of SA’s leading research economists — are alarming but not surprising. Overall, they paint a dismal picture of lost opportunities in a country that has failed to grow substantially for the past decade.

While the research reinforces much of what is already known about the economy — that SA “is getting poorer and its people more desperate” — its main departure is to show that …