Reducing the cost of doing business a priority - Mbeki

ED RICHARDSON ECONOMIC GROWTH, improving SA’s level of competitiveness, and crime were some of the issues raised by president Thabo Mbeki in this year’s State of the Nation speech. Some of the business-related priorities that he outlined were: • To improve SA’s export performance, focusing on services and manufactured goods; • To implement programmes to ensure broad-based black economic empowerment; • To reduce the cost of doing business in SA. Mbeki said that the country’s economy was growing at a prosperous rate. The government wants to reduce the cost of doing business and promote investment, according to Mbeki. “[The] practical introduction of the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) system, developing high-speed national and international broadband capacity, finalising the plan to improve the capacity of the rail and port operations” were some of the plans cited for this. With regard to the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative (AsgiSA), which was implemented last year to address labour and skills development, Mbeki said that it would review the country’s exchange rate, inflation and interest rates so that measures could be put in place to facilitate the growth of industries to produce tradables for both the domestic and export markets. For the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills Acquisition (JIPSA), Mbeki said that decisions had been reached on the resources required to ensure that the skills in short supply were provided. A part of this involves addressing issues in the Second Economy.