ALISTER BULL, Cape Town | Monday 4.30pm
FINANCE Minister Trevor Manuel said on Monday the country needed to grow by more than its forecast 3.5% to ease poverty and would pick the brains of international experts to meet this challenge.
”We will invite a panel of ‘significant economists’ later this year to help us think through this… 3.5% is not bad, but it is an inadequate pace,” he told parliament’s finance committee.
Statistics SA reported earlier on Monday that gross domestic product grew by 3.6% in the fourth quarter of 1999, versus 3.1% in the previous three months, and by 1.2 percent for the year overall.
Manuel has already forecast growth to average 3.4% over the next three years and to be 3.5% in 2000.
But this falls well short of the 6% estimated to be needed to ease unemployment in a nation where a third of the labour force lacks formal work and thousands of school leavers enter the job market every year.
Chronic joblessness means poverty remains entrenched for millions of poor blacks despite six years of majority rule.
The dangers of crime and social unrest this poses for the country remains a major concern of international credit rating agencies.
Manuel said that the panel would be a separate initiative to President Thabo Mbeki’s Business Council, whose members include heavyweights like billionaire investor George Soros and which is to focus primarily on improving foreign long-term investment.
He envisaged a ”brainstorming” session of top world economists, working within South Africa’s existing budgetary commitments, to come up with more inventive proposals than the usual calls for faster privatisation and softer labour laws. — Reuters