The National Budget Speech is one of the most important addresses of the year for South Africa, and this year’s is scheduled to take on February 26.
For 2020, however, Minister of Finance Tito Mboweni would like the opinions of the country’s citizens to hear how they think the economy can grow further.
The Budget Speech announces which allocations will be prioritised for the different sectors of the economy.
“What can government do to achieve faster and more equitable economic growth?”, Minister Mboweni is asking the public.
As reported by BusinessTech, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) states that the country’s growth forecast for this year looks “bleak”. Following frequent load shedding, which caused economic growth in 2019 to slow drastically, the general consensus among financial groups places South Africa’s GDP growth outlook for 2020 at below 1%.
The country’s 2019 growth was stunted by power outages as a result of load shedding, and this led to a major decline of 3.2%. Despite GDP boost in the fourth quarter that was expected to balance out the year of declines, analysts, economists and financial groups are not hopeful of a significant reversal in the country’s 2019 growth numbers.
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