(AsgiSA) Annual Report 2008 - South African Government Information

Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa
ANNUAL REPORT
2008
In addition, SOEs now confront the difficult task of balancing the need to fund major new
investments with concern about above-inflation increases in tariffs, particularly during the
economic downturn.
Addressing these challenges requires:
• broader agreement between the main stakeholders inside and outside government on financing
models for new infrastructure investment to minimise the overall economic costs
and avoid policy instability
• the establishment of systems to monitor the cost of infrastructure against realistic targets.
Skills development is a second area requiring greater co-ordination across government. The
State must do more to ensure that national skills funds are allocated in line with economic
needs, and specifically with sectoral policies. An important step to this end would be to ensure
that the Setas foresight sectoral skills are more regularly determined, in line with their
core mandate.
Finally, government must also ensure greater coherence across regulatory frameworks to
minimise the burden on the economy and on individual businesses. A specific challenge is to
ensure that new, transformative standards, notably around BEE, the environment, and electricity
efficiency, are, when taken all together, both affordable and as efficient as possible.
The year under review saw a lively discussion on how to bring about greater co-ordination
in economic policy, focusing mostly on how to enhance government’s planning procedures
and institutions. From this standpoint, the initiation of the IPAP represented an important
step towards aligning economic policy around key priorities. The challenge is to strengthen
the IPAP, in particular by:
(a) Extending its scope, particularly to integrate policies on mining, agriculture and the tertiary
sector, which remain critical for exports, food security and employment. A major
step towards including these critical sectors would be the development of a common
methodology for designing and implementing sectoral strategies across the State.
(b)Institutionalising the IPAP as a rolling three-year plan, as proposed in the National
Industrial Policy Framework. To date, the proposed review and re-publication of the IPAP,
which is crucial to ensure responsiveness to new conditions, has experienced serious
delays.
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