BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

Section 6 of Statement 500 excludes the following items from procurement in the calculation of the total measured procurement spend:

• taxes, levies and rates levied by organs of state and local government
• public sector procurement from organs of state or public entities listed in Schedule 1 of the Public Finance Management Act of 1998.

Schedule 1 entities include constitutional entities such as the Public Protector, the Human Sciences Research Council, national government, provincial and local government. The intention is not to require Schedule 1 entities to obtain BEE verification. However, Schedule 2 and 3 entities will require BEE verification. Read the rest of this entry »

Suppose, for example, that the GDP growth rate exceeds the interest rate by five percentage points. Then the steady-state deficit-to-GDP ratio will be 5 per cent of the debt-to-GDP ratio. If the debt-to-GDP ratio is at, for example, 60 per cent, then the primary deficit-to-GDP ratio can be permanently maintained at 3 per cent. Incidentally, these figures are the same as those stipulated in the European Union Maastricht Treaty as ‘convergence criteria’ for debt and deficit. Note that if the GDP growth rate exceeds the interest rate by five percentage points, then no less than one-fifth of the public sector in our ’small government‘ example, and one-tenth of the ‘big government‘ example, can be permanently financed by allowing the government debt to grow continuously. Taxpayers would be relieved accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

This stagnation tendency, the growing savings gap, has often been viewedas a problem. But why should one look at it that way? Isn’t the gap really a big resource? Should it not be encouraged? For the bigger the gap, the greater the scope for deficit financing of public spending. Indeed, the graver the stagnationist tendencies of the private sector, the lower the taxes can go, and the greater the scope for public borrowing and a growing debt. Instead of encouraging private spending as a remedy for stagnation, should we not promote private saving to widen the savings gap? For by so doing, we could deficit finance all the more, and enjoy the supply-side benefits of reduced taxation. Read the rest of this entry »

ADDITIONAL ASPECTS OF PSE

One of the chief limitations of the PSE approach is that PSE subsidies may bemisdirected when used by state or local governments to pay employees already hired, or workers who would have been hired in the absence of the program. This kind of ‘fiscal substitution’ appears inherent in a PSE approach because it functions as a disguised form of revenue sharing.

A study prepared under the auspices of the National Planning Association estimated a fiscal substitution effect of 0.46 after one year. Subsequent studies produced conflicting results, but verified that the fiscal-substitution effect can be substantial (Bergman and Bennett, 1977). The greater the substitution of federal funds for state and local funds, the less effectively PSE will operate as an employment program. Read the rest of this entry »

Proponents of functional finance are committed to the principle that government’s power to tax, spend, borrow and manage its debt can and should be used as an instrument for achieving the goals sanctioned by a democratic voting process for the macroeconomy. The premise of functional finance is quite explicitly that a dynamic capitalistic economy is inherently unstable, so that unemployment and price instabilities periodically impose economic pain on the economy as a whole, which impacts most severely on labor markets. Wages and salaries comprise two-thirds of earned income; both J.M. Keynes, and subsequently Laurence Klein and Richard Kosabud, have shown the ratio of the wage relative to the profit share to be historically constant in national income (Keynes, 1939; Klein and Kosabud, 1961). Read the rest of this entry »