Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas
Photo by: Duane Daws
Government must acknowledge that it has a responsibility to create an environment that drives private sector growth, especially since the bulk of employment is in the private sector.
Speaking at the launch of the World Bank report Doing Business in South Africa 2015 on Friday, Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas added that the report was a reminder that service delivery by local government had a direct effect on economic development.
The Doing Business project provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 189 economies and selected cities at the sub-national and regional level. Doing Business in South Africa 2015 is the first World Bank report that compares business regulations affecting domestic firms in all eight metropolitan municipalities and the local municipality of Msunduzi.
Regulations relevant to six stages in the life of a small to medium-size firm are measured: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, enforcing contracts, and trading across borders. Doing Business aims to encourage economies to compete towards more efficient regulation, offers measurable benchmarks for reform and serves as a resource for academics, journalists, private sector researchers and others interested in the business climate of each economy.
Between 1996 and 2012, Jonas said, the country’s eight metros accounted for 53% of all the additional value-added achieved. While the national economy was growing at an average compound annual growth rate of three percent, the metro economies were growing at 3.7%. He said the report highlighted the fact that there were many good practices already in place in South African cities, but there was also still much work to be done.
By conducting this survey, Jonas said, the South African government was launching a process that would motivate city governments to improve their processes, become more competitive and facilitate city economic growth and development.
“Each city government has something to learn through international benchmarking and the domestic peer-learning processes.”
The National Treasury launched the Doing the Business in South Africa 2015 report in partnership with the Department of Trade and Industry, the South African Cities Network and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs.
Jonas concluded: “We expect that the next set of results, to be released in 2018, will show significant improvement over these results.”