Makes for a nice change, doesn’t it?

There’s plenty of doom and gloom around right now (Sunday’s Carte Blanche segment on emigration, for example), but if you ask leading economist Mike Schüssler, there is hope on the horizon for our economy.

‘On the horizon’ is the key phrase, because he does add that “the first quarter will likely be a disaster with corruption and SOEs taking some time longer to sort out”.

Still, Schüssler (pictured below) says that we could start seeing growth by 2021/22. Here’s BusinessTech:

Schüssler said he was cautiously optimistic about South Africa’s growth prospects: “I think we can expect to start seeing growth after a few quarters. We’re probably over the worst, and by 2021/22 we could be back at 3% GDP growth,” he said.

To help spur this growth, the country needed to be tougher on crime and labour protests, and ease tax and legislation that hampered small business growth.

“A profit motive is what enables businesses to grow – if a business doesn’t make a profit it simply can’t create jobs. So the government needs to reduce the risks of business investment and reduce the red tape in the way of small business growth,”he said.

Best hope that Cyril gets cracking on that New Dawn, then.

That long-term forecast sounds promising, but Old Mutual Group chief economist Johann Els echoes Schüssler’s comments about the short term:

[Speaking] at roundtable event on Tuesday, [he said] that South Africa could enter another technical recession, having done so in 2018.

“I’d say there’s a 50-50 chance SA will see another technical recession this year,” Els said…

Els said that he expects the first-quarter GDP to contract 1.5%-2%, however, he added that the next five years will be better than the last five.

Hey, we’ll take our ‘good news’ however we can get it.

[source:businesstech]