Category: Economy
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Tourism recovery: Visitors to Table Mountain, cableway are on the rise
The number of visitors to the Table Mountain National Park climbed to 2.8-million in 2023. A 56% increase on 2022, or an additional 1-million visitors. The national park, home to the iconic Table Mountain, had 3.2-million visitors in 2019. Also on the rise are visitors to the Table Mountain Aerial Cableway. Numbers shot up 44%…
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SA’s low-cost housing programme on shaky ground
Just 42,773 government-subsidised houses were built in South Africa in the 2023/24 financial year. That’s an 82% decline compared with the 235,635 houses built 26 years ago in 1998/99. About 10% of government-subsidised houses were recorded as having weak walls and roofs, according to Statistics SA’s 2023 General Household Survey. Mpumalanga and the Western Cape had…
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ZA inflation steadies
Annual consumer price inflation was unchanged at 5.2% in May in line with some expectations, Statistics SA reported on Wednesday. The annual inflation rate of goods last month was 5.7%, unchanged from April, and for services, it was 4.7%, up from 4.6%. Food and non-alcoholic beverages inflation remained steady at 4.7% in May, unchanged from…
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Nigerians face crippling food price increases
Nigerians are facing steep increases in food prices as inflation figures hit record highs. In May 2024 food inflation increased to 40.66%, an almost 16 percentage point increase on the May 2023 inflation rate of 24.82%, Punch reports. Headline inflation (covering all consumer goods) increased to 33.95% according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).…
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How Eskom and other state-owned companies drain the government’s coffers
In its Budget Review 2024, the Treasury included a section titled ‘How state-owned company support has become a drain on the fiscus’. It showed how in 2020, support given to these companies, which include Eskom, South African Airways (SAA), Denel, the Post Office and Transnet, reached R59.8-billion and has not dropped below that level since.…
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Slim pickings: What Joburg’s bin pickers earn and how long they’ve worked
Known variously as bin pickers, trolley pushers or dumpsite reclaimers, South Africa’s informal waste collectors play a surprisingly outsized role in the economy. Back in 2011 the Department of Environmental Affairs conservatively estimated that there could be as many as 62,000 waste pickers in the country, with about 40% of them working as trolley pushers.…
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SA stock market listings halve over past 30 years
The number of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange today is just half of the number of companies listed 30 years ago. Listings peaked at 669 listings in 1998, but the dot-com crash led to 128 companies delisting within 2 years. There was a brief resurgence between 2003 and 2008 with the introduction of…
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Democracy in South Africa: 30 years in 8 charts
As South Africa marks 30 years of democracy, the legacy of the African National Congress is under scrutiny. On one hand, nearly half the population receives some form of grant funding, but unemployment rates are alarmingly high and business confidence has waned significantly. These economic challenges cast a dark shadow over the milestone that is 3 decades…