{"id":300950,"date":"2019-02-20T17:07:58","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T15:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=300950"},"modified":"2019-02-20T17:07:58","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T15:07:58","slug":"4-charts-that-show-south-africas-big-debt-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/budget-speech\/300950\/4-charts-that-show-south-africas-big-debt-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"4 charts that show South Africa’s big debt problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

South African finance minister Tito Mboweni unveiled his budget for the coming fiscal year, and the outlook for the continent\u2019s most industrialised economy isn\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n

The National Treasury has cut economic growth forecasts, plans to reduce state spending and won\u2019t provide tax relief for citizens as it seeks more funds to prop up debt-laden state-owned companies, including yet another record bailout for power utility Eskom, which last week struggled to keep the lights on.<\/p>\n

Below are charts illustrating the predicament the country finds itself in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The National Treasury forecast a fiscal gap of 4.5%\u00a0of gross domestic product for the year starting 1 April. If realised, it would be the worst since the 6.3%\u00a0reported in fiscal 2010, and bigger than the estimate in a Bloomberg survey.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Treasury reduced the forecast for expansion in gross domestic product this year to 1.5%\u00a0from 1.7% estimated in October, and cut growth predictions for the next two years.<\/p>\n

The economy hasn\u2019t expanded by more than 2% since 2013.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Forecasts for gross debt as a percentage of GDP are worse than the October estimates for every year through 2027, with the figure expected to stabilise at 60.2%\u00a0in 2023-24 compared with the prior prediction of 59.6% for the same year.<\/p>\n

The slippages come as the Treasury provides a R23 billion ($1.6 billion) lifeline to loss-making power utility Eskom in each of the next three years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The fastest-growing expenditure item in the budget is debt-servicing costs, with the country spending R182.2 billion in fiscal 2019, rising to R247 billion\u00a0 by 2022.<\/p>\n

South Africa is ‘borrowing about R1.2 billion a day, assuming we don\u2019t borrow money on the weekend,” Mboweni said.<\/p>\n

\n

Read: The 2019 budget in a nutshell<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South African finance minister Tito Mboweni unveiled his budget for the coming fiscal year, and the outlook for the continent\u2019s most industrialised economy isn\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":290474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13716],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-300950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-budget-speech","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300950"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300982,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300950\/revisions\/300982"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}