Investec Says Sluggish Growth Has Cost South Africa $251 Billion
South Africa's economy is 37% smaller than it would have been had the country tracked its emerging-market peers and sustained annual growth of 4.5% since 2010, a report by Investec Wealth & Investment International said.
It calculated that matching those expansion rates would have lifted the country's nominal gross domestic product to almost 12 trillion rand ($670 billion) last year, from 7.5 billion rand. The slow growth partly coincided with an era of endemic government corruption — known in South Africa as state capture — under former President Jacob Zuma, which his successor Cyril Ramaphosa estimates cost the economy at least 500 billion rand.
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