South Africa’s Post-apartheid ECONOMIC Development Trajectory

Abstract

South Africa’s economic and social development trajectory in the post-apartheid period remains a controversial subject, notwithstanding the extensive literature that has developed. This chapter covers the full spectrum of this debate, but importantly also offers new insights and analysis of the issues. The literature is vast. At one extreme, views from the far left argue that the African National Congress (ANC) has essentially ‘sold out’ and followed uncritically a neo-liberal growth path, to defenders of the ANC’s policies from active participants in the process at the other extreme. Between these two views, there are a number of significant contributions. This chapter reviews the history and contestation of economic policy in South Africa and offers some explanations for why the country’s economic progress has been so uneven. It argues that chronic economic underperformance is the result of two persistent problems in the political-economic structure of South Africa. The first is the failure of politicians and policymakers to account for the limits of South African state capacity to implement even simple economic reforms; post-apartheid economic policymaking is characterized by an assumption that the South African state is able to carry out complex economic coordination and effect reforms. Second, the impasse is really a political one caused by ideological contestation within the ANC which has no mechanism to resolve the impasse.