South African Budget 2019: Hard Choices in Tough Times

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South African Budget 2019: Hard Choices in Tough Times: Abstract

In January 2019, as South Africa’s minister of finance, Tito Mboweni, was finalising the country’s 2019 budget, the country’s fiscal position remained on a knife-edge. On the positive side, the expenditure ceiling to which the government had committed itself in the 2018/19 budget remained intact. Nevertheless economic growth predictions remained low, the country’s debt was reaching unsustainable levels and the perilous financial position of some of the country’s state-owned entities (SOEs) was putting the entire fiscus in peril. Mboweni and his team had to find a way of putting the country on a path to fiscal sustainability, given the fiscal inheritance that his predecessors had left him.