Something strange happened last week. An international credit ratings agency told us we should act more like a developmental state. Standard & Poors — which does credit ratings of countries and large companies — warned that South Africa’s power utility Eskom needed a financial injection from the government in order to cover the costs of […]
Nimrod Zalk
Nimrod Zalk is Deputy Director-General of Industrial Development at the South African Department of Trade and Industry.
It goes without saying that these opinions are his own.
Posted inBusiness
Dropping import tariffs to raise exports: How mumbo-jumbo conquered the policy ‘debate’
The heated discussion over the past few weeks about whether South Africa should unilaterally lower its import tariffs reminds me of Francis Wheen’s excellent book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. In it, Wheen documents a range of modern delusions where truths are assumed to be so obvious that there […]