SOUTH AFRICA AFTER APARTHEID: PROSPECTS FOR ECONOMIC RECOVERY

We know the blunt facts. Real GDP per capita has fallen to early 1970s levels, whites enjoy incomes many times those of Africans, only one in eight work seekers finds a formal sector job, malnutrition and measles prey on children from poor rural farnilics. The apartheid economy is in a mess. Can it be restructured during the next decade or so, to achieve sustained recovery while facilitating the democratization of society? Any attempt to speculate about growth patterns for a decade ahead in a country as complex and conflict-ridden as South Africa must be something of a megalomaniacal exercise. Perhaps it is futile, too. Economic growth is a complex, erratic and disputed process, determined by a range of economic, social and ideological factors in society, and theories and models simply cannot incorporate all the important variables and relations between them. This is a field in which even the best-rounded predictions by apparent experts can, and do, go badly wrong. Even though I will not indulge in forecasts here, firmly pragmatic and hard-headed readers should sign off at this point. Instead, I cany out a conceptual exercise below, describing various economic scenarios proposed for South Africa and evaluating their likely economic success or failure, in bot