IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/soa/wpaper/85.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Stuck in Low GEAR? Macroeconomic Policy in South Africa, 1996-1998

Author

Listed:
  • John Weeks

    (Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London, UK)

Abstract

Despite its ideology while in opposition, once in power the ANC government implemented an orthodox macroeconomic policy which stressed deficit reduction and a tight monetary policy, combined with trade liberalisation. The stated purpose of this package (the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution programme, socalled GEAR) was to increase economic growth, with a 4.2 rate programmed for 1996-2000. At mid-term of the programme, growth remained far below this target. The GEAR’s lack of success cannot be explained by unfavourable external factors; rather, the disappointing performance seemed the result of fiscal contraction and excessively high interest rates.

Suggested Citation

  • John Weeks, 1999. "Stuck in Low GEAR? Macroeconomic Policy in South Africa, 1996-1998," Working Papers 85, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, UK.
    • Handle: RePEc:soa:wpaper:85
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.soas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/economics-wp085.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:soa:wpaper:85. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chandni Dwarkasing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/desoauk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.