(AsgiSA) Annual Report 2008 - South African Government Information

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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. 68
Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa ANNUAL REPORT 2008 (c) Ensuring that the measures and programmes proposed for industrial policy, when taken together, are sufficient to achieve the AsgiSA targets for growth, employment and poverty alleviation. The current list of proposals and achievements, while impressive, appears to fall short of this standard. Here, the main challenge will be to increase the resourcing available to back up industrial policy, particularly through targeted provision of infrastructure and credit. From a sectoral standpoint, more consistent and powerful government engagement is needed around: • agrarian reform • infrastructural and regulatory support for the mining value chain, as the critical export sector • securing sustainable growth in the tertiary sector, which remains central to employment creation • engagement with the southern African region, as a major market for manufactures and services • defining the role of knowledge-based and green industries, which are key for long-term, dynamic growth, but which cannot create much employment in the foreseeable future. 69
Page 3 and 4:
ANNUAL REPORT 2008 Accelerated and
Page 5 and 6:
Accelerated and Shared Growth Initi
Page 7 and 8:
Page 9 and 10:
Page 11 and 12:
Page 13 and 14:
Page 15 and 16:
Page 17 and 18:
Page 19 and 20: Accelerated and Shared Growth Initi
Page 69: Accelerated and Shared Growth Initi
Page 77: Accelerated and Shared Growth Initi
show all

(AsgiSA) Annual Report 2008 - South African Government Information

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?