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    Budget 2025 Preview: Pressures and tensions along the austerity road to fiscal sustainability
    (Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, 2025-02) Sachs, Michael; Amra, Rashaad; Madonko, Thokozile; Willcox, Owen
    This policy brief, ahead of the tabling of the 2025 Budget Review, considers the policy context and the fiscal and economic environment in which the Budget will be tabled. It considers the merits, limitations, and likely consequences of the government’s approach to budget policy over the medium term, as contained in the 2024 Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement (MTBPS), which redoubled efforts to consolidate public finances while attempting to promote capital spending. Since the MTBPS, several material expenditure pressures have emerged, some of which were flagged in the Public Economy Project’s (PEP) 2024 MTBPS analysis, and the economic outlook has been revised. Based on this, the Public Economy Project’s revised outlook for public finance finds that the government’s ambitious plan to stabilise debt over the medium term is unlikely to be realised.
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    Austerity Without Consolidation: Fiscal policy and spending choices in Budget 2023
    (Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2023-06-01) Sachs, Michael; Amra, Rashaad; Madonko, Thokozile; Willcox, Owen
    Fiscal policy can play a crucial role in fostering growth and development by ensuring the sustainable delivery of essential public services. Managed effectively, government’s budget can help us build a common society and overcome the segregation and inequality of the past, without which sustained economic growth seems unlikely. It can also respond to temporary macroeconomic shocks to aggregate demand and livelihoods. South Africa however finds itself in a worsening fiscal impasse. There is continuous austerity, dating back more than a decade, but South Africa appears no closer to achieving fiscal consolidation. This position is steadily eroding the fiscal capabilities necessary for the state to realise the potential that fiscal action offers. Instead, the budget is increasingly becoming a drag on development.