More needed to turn around economy
Government needs more incisive measures to turn around the economy, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies conceded.
|||Cape Town - The contraction of the South African economy in the last quarter was a sign that government needed more incisive measures to turn around the economy, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies conceded on Tuesday.
“We have had one quarter of contraction. I am not in a position to be able to say whether this quarter will see something similar or not but I think the one quarter’s figures tell us that we have got a challenge, that things are becoming much more difficult than they were before,” Davies told media in Cape Town when asked whether the country was heading for a second consecutive term of negative growth, which would technically signal a recession.
He said government’s interventions to transform the economy and promote industrialisation, development and investment were showing success - particularly in the automotive, textile and film industries - but it was clear more needed to be done to compensate for the effects of plummeting commodity prices, electricity constraints and the downturn in the mining sector.
“Are our interventions sufficient? Well, before the figures came out we did review what we had done in the nine-point programme of government and we saw that we had made progress in many of them, for example, I will suggest that the energy situation, while we are not completely out of the woods yet, it is a lot more stable than it was at the beginning of the year,” Davis added.
“We think that we are standing and facing a challenge, and that we do in fact need to increase the impact of our interventions, I think that we need not kid ourselves, there is no magic wand available, we need to make better, faster and more effective progress across the nine points.
“We think we have laid a basis, but we need to push further and faster.”
ANA