The conflict between the need to attend to acute poverty in the present and the need to invest in longer-term poverty-reducing economic growth is a primary feature of the South African public policy landscape. Economic growth rates, while not alarmingly low (3.4% on average, annually, between 2000 and 2012, 1% from 2007-2012), have also not been sufficiently high or reflective of the type of growth needed to fuel job creation. On income, the economy’s classification as an upper-middle income country, based simply on a GNI per capita measure, obscures the extent to which it is structured into two nearly distinct and large sub-economies – one resembling that of a high income country, the other among the poorest in the world.
by 