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Cape Town - South Africa has continued its downward trend after falling to 56th place out of 144 countries in the latest Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum (WEF).
On top of that, SA is third among the Brics economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
South Africa did well on measures of the quality of its institutions (36th), including intellectual property protection (22nd), property rights (20th), the efficiency of its legal framework in challenging and settling disputes (9th and 15th, respectively) and its top-notch auditing (1st) and accountability of private institutions (2nd).
"Furthermore, South Africa’s financial market development remains impressive at 7th place, although our data point to more difficulties in all channels of obtaining finance this year," business consultancy Meredith Harington said in a statement on Friday.
"The country also has an efficient market for goods and services (32nd) and it does reasonably well in more complex areas such as business sophistication (31st) and innovation (43rd), benefitting from good scientific research institutions (34th) and strong collaboration between universities and the business sector in innovation (31st)."
South Africa’s transport infrastructure (32nd) is good by regional standards, although its electricity supply does suffer disruptions (99th).
"But the country’s strong ties to advanced economies, notably the euro area, has made it more vulnerable to the economic slowdown of those economies," according to Meredith Harington.
"These ties are likely to have contributed to the deterioration of fiscal indicators: Its performance in the macroeconomic environment - having dropped sharply in the previous year - remains at 89th."
Low scores
Low scores for the diversion of public funds (96th), the perceived wastefulness of government spending (89th) and a more general lack of public trust in politicians (90th) remain worrisome and security (95th) continues to be a major area of concern for doing business.
Building a skilled labour force and creating sufficient employment also present considerable challenges.
The health of the workforce is ranked 132nd out of 144 economies—as a result of high rates of communicable diseases and poor health indicators more generally.
Higher education and training remains insufficient (86th) and labour market efficiency (113th) is affected by extremely rigid hiring and firing practices (143rd), wage inflexibility (139th) and continuing significant tensions in labor-employer relations (144th).
"Raising education standards and making the labour market more efficient will thus be critical in view of the country’s high unemployment rate of over 20%, with the youth unemployment rate estimated at over 50%,” the company said.
"Once again the trend of being sadly let down by South Africa’s labour regime, primary health and basic education is strongly evident."
Local examples
Bez Sangari, MD of Sangari SA, a long-established education services company, said progress in education is being made, but not enough.
“With the specific solutions available covering maths and science education, significant headway is being made in raising students’ marks,” he said.
“There are solutions that are uplifting maths and science education and are proving to be effective, but there is a severe lack of funds. Schools simply don’t have the money to implement enough of these systems. Schools share one solution across multiple classes, limiting their use.”
He said the businesses investing in these solutions are benefitting the country’s education crisis and are earning BEE points, but the challenge is for more businesses to get involved.
One such solution, the iBox which is installed at number of schools across the country, is now part of a GDE programme to support science, maths and life sciences at Dinaledi schools in Sedibeng West.
“Since implementing the iBox in 2011 there has been a marked improvement in maths and physical sciences results,” said Gauta Legoete, Dinaledi co-ordinator for GDE for District 8.
In 2009, the pass rate was 28%; this improved to 68% in 2013, which Legoete attributes directly to the use of the iBox.
The ActiveSciences Mobile Lab, which complements the iBox, encourages teachers and learners to gain practical science experience through curriculum-aligned experiments.
Ixopo High School, an English medium school with 610 learners and 25 teachers situated on the border of the Kwazulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, is also benefiting from the iBox learning system, improving the pass rate by 40% for grade 12 learners.
- Fin24
