Posted inGeneral

South Africa: Progress and challenges

As suggested in Elhanan Helpman’s Mystery of Economic Growth, there are many tasks that rest on the shoulders of a (developmental) state. The same line of thinking can be discerned also in Jeffery Sach’s End of Poverty. In our context, for example, it is incontrovertible that the state, or its main agent (that is, the […]

Posted inNews/Politics

South Africa: A developmental state?

Referring to South Africa and/or South Africans, Pusch Commey (in the July 2008 issue of NewAfrican) argues that ‘the trouble is with a massive psychologically-scarred population left behind by a psychologically-devastating system – apartheid’. This is probably one of the few very direct appraisals of the challenges that face us as a country and the […]

Posted inGeneral

South Africans: A tale of contradictions?

In an attempt to illuminate a view that South Africa is a complex case, and not special per se, I said that “South Africans have been consistently giving most of us an impression that we are developing some form of national identity. Public opinion surveys have been showing a trend of improving ‘social cohesion’”. All […]