When president Cyril Ramaphosa announced the decision to implement an initial 21-day national lockdown in response to the threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, he referred to “modeling” on which the decision was based.
The 2019 Nobel Prize has been awarded to three scholars for pioneering recent attempts to answer microeconomic issues in development using randomized experiments.
South Africa’s public finances are in a perilous state. There are four main reasons for this. First, economic growth is low or non-existent. Second, tax revenue collection is repeatedly below forecasts. Third, debt levels have risen rapidly and are now at their highest levels in the post-apartheid era. Fourth, the poor performance of state-owned enterprises is necessitating large-scale government support.
Public discussion about higher education funding in South Africa has been beset by numerous fictions and misunderstandings since the Fees Must Fall movement emerged in 2015. These have been compounded by the political opportunism of president Jacob Zuma and his advisors.
