MBUYISENI NDLOZI: SA may very well be beyond a technical recession, and this is why
You cannot ask for market-friendly policies, promising growth and jobs and, when they do not happen, refuse to take the blame
On Tuesday, the EFF released a statement following Statistics SA’s announcement that SA had entered a technical recession. In that statement, the EFF made the correct critique that this recession, alongside SA’s other economic woes — unemployment, poverty and underdevelopment — must be blamed squarely on white monopoly capital. In this piece, we shall expand on this view. It is generally acknowledged that recession is a period of negative growth in economic activity, particularly if such occurs in two consecutive quarters in a country’s GDP. To be specific, it is technical because it does not consider a comprehensive set of measures such as employment and income. Therefore, the second quarter negative growth of 0.7% after the 2.6% negative growth in the first quarter led us into a recession. According to the 2018 second quarter labour survey, unemployment was recorded at 27.7%, an increase from 26.7% in the first quarter. Also, the Poverty Trends in SA report by Statistics SA, which...
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