This is really fantastic news. Â The Swazi King is apparently reluctant to accept the loan from South Africa because of the conditions imposed in the agreement. I was quite harsh in criticising the granting of the loan with only conditions for improvement far down the line. Â (I still believe the first condition should be an…
I’m flying to Lagos for a few days to work with a couple of Nigerian insurers. The Nigerian financial services market is already significant and growing, but insurance is still quite small. Risk and capital management are embryonic and there are simply too few actuaries in the market to push practices beyond the 1970s. Net…
With all the debate and discussion about the costs (and hopefully benefits) of NHI, it really is encouraging to see that the Department of Health and government aren’t hanging all their hopes on the Big Bang of NIH to solve our healthcare issues. As we slowly put the curse of the Mbeki-Manto-Beetroot alliance behind us,…
So the NHI is predicted to cost R125bn in 2012 rising to R214bn by 2020. I need to dig into this more, but I researched on StatsSA website: 2009 personal income tax raised as R154bn. This excludes SITE, but still asks a very specific question about affordability.
So Swaziland is in a whole heap of economic and political trouble; South Africa’s loan isn’t going to change any of that in the long run. The way the global economy looks at the moment, there’s no particular reason to think that the SA economy is going to be anything better than stagnant over the…
Swaziland vs Greece? More like Swaziland and Greece: Linked to a currency they can’t control Potentially devastating consequences if they devalue their currency and move away from the peg Fiscal irresponsibility A small country relative to their economic neighbors Except Swaziland has a dictator in charge and gets a bail-out without serious conditions and at…
I don’t know that one can argue categorically for or against the loan to Swaziland. Yes, there are plenty of bad things going on in Swaziland and I’ve blogged about them before. On the other hand, the citizens of Swaziland will also hopefully benefit in some way from the loan. I don’t want to get…
Germany’s economy is growing at a time when few others are. This is partly led by an export boom, which obviously can’t be the solution for the global economy. More than that though, they generally do have a productive labour force with high levels of physical and human capital. @justinfloor tweets a link to this…
