...Compulsory Essay Question 50 Marks Question: How do you think South Africa could grow faster, create more jobs and reduce inequality? In your answer explain how your policy objectives would achieve their intended objective. CORRECTING SOUTH AFRICA’S STRUCTURAL FAULTS FOR INCREASED ECONOMIC GROWTH (Mentionsomething about GEAR and RDP) Introduction Economic growth has been handicapped by high levels of unemployment, poverty and inequality, which continue to plague society today. Since 1994 South Africa has achieved an average growth rate of 3 %, a level that is mediocre by international standards and is still below what is deemed necessary for supporting a lasting transition to democracy and correcting the historical injustices of apartheid. Numerous policies have been implemented to correct these faults and increase growth but have seen little success. A combination of poor economic reasoning and implementation may account for this. But a recurring problem with historical and current policies is that they are contradictory and at times conflicting. The 2008 OECD report highlighted this in AsgiSA, which focuses on employee training but offers little to improve basic education. Therefore, correcting these faults and achieving increased growth calls for complementary policies to create a virtuous cycle for success. The following essay looks at the labour market, industry, trade and public-private partnerships as areas of focus for constructing a democratic developmental...
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...Plate tectonics give and take – Discuss Plate movement is caused by convection currents in the asthenosphere which is the lower part of the mantle. Heat form radioactive hotspots decays near the core and this residual heat, heats up the surrounding magma causing it to rise. This forms the rising limb of the convection current. When the current reaches the lithosphere, made up of the crust and the upper part of the mantle, the convection currents diverge. As it diverges, it drags the lithosphere with it. The convection current cools and descends forming the descending limb of the convection current. This pulls with it the lithosphere in a process known as dragging. This is proved by the moving of continents as seen in Wegener’s theory. He believed that there used to be one super continent called pangea 225 million years ago which later split up into the continents we have today showing that plate tectonic must give and take to move the continents we have today that have split off from the single continent of pangea. However Wegener’s theory is unable to explain how continental movement could have taken place. More evidence for plates giving and taking is palaeomagnetism which is the study of the Earth's magnetic field in rocks. Sea floor spreading was discovered at the North Atlantic Ridge where alternating polarity of rock can be seen which forms the ocean crust. Iron particles in lava erupted on the ocean floor are aligned with the earths magnetic field. As the lava solidifies...
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...economist own fault and problem to why in 2008 the economy fail and we went on a recession. The reason to why he says that it is the economist own fault to why we went on recession was that the economist thought that they had figured out the perfect economy policy due to their research and mathematical formulas that made them think that they had solved the mystery of a perfect non recession economy. So what I mean is that in a way they thought there research and thoughts were bullet proof of recessions and even worse another great depression. Furthermore, in this article Paul goes into deep detail to why economists are the way they are and also if they would ever change their beliefs in the future. However Paul does mention in this article that there are very few economist that did predict that a recession would happen in the future, but due to the fact of hoe cocky economist were with their formula an research that they actually laughed at the these few economist, but at it is said whoever laughs last laughs better. Article Background In this article Paul gives a total description of how we reached our recession in 2008 and he starts giving out details from the history of economy and how the first great depression happened in the 1930’s. Paul explains that since the term economy was created economists have always tried to keep a stable economy throughout history, by creating different policies such as the monetary policy and the fiscal policy to keep an economy afloat....
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...businesses practices. The article questions our methods of learning another culture and challenges us to no just learn the “black and white” rules of another culture but to actually learn about the settle differences and apply them to our daily practices. It will take more than studying and reading about other cultures to fully understand and connect with people of other cultures. The U.S department of education held a conference to evaluate the meaning of globalization and what it meant to different people around the world. People who oppose the idea of globalization view it as a tool to impose western cultural values on different cultures around the world. Many people view globalization as a tool of “cultural imperialism”, in which America can spread their pop culture and consumer values for their own elfish needs. However, others view globalization has necessary and essential agreement between nations to effectively and efficiently spread world resources. These people believe that globalization can help stem worldwide poverty in some areas and stimulate positive growth in developing countries. From a more objective perspective, globalization is the “embodiment of the world merging into massive transactional networks and nexuses of countries in terms of trade, commerce, capital investment, production, and other exchange flows.” From a statistical standpoint, globalization has been proved to have a positive effect on the world economy. This can be shown through the 50 year peak...
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...whether or not they will be safe, how they will operate, and how their use will affect the government as well as how they’ll affect the people who are using or are around them. Autonomous vehicular technology will change the way we live as well as the laws we have to follow. Whether or not the changes will be good is debatable. Law-making will be affected in that the older/traditional laws we have now will not be up to par with the technology we will soon face. The effect of autonomous vehicles on the economy could be for the greater good of society, or could help contribute to the further downfall of it, depending on where the technology is developed as well as how and where it is used. Autonomous cars could and will affect society, in that of the economy. The start of the use of the technology could potentially contribute to the unemployment rate, which would help diminish what good of the economy we have left. As Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman ponder “Are we prepared for an economy in which 50% of people aren’t working?” (Condon/Wiseman). As technology ascends greatly, jobs are created and destroyed. With this,wages will plummet, and the unemployment rate will continue to escalate. “What happens to the millions of people who make a living driving cars and trucks--jobs that always have seemed sheltered from the onslaught of technology?” (Wiseman/Condon). If autonomous vehicles take the wheel, people whose occupation involves driving such as a truck or taxi driver will be out...
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...terrorism" and was very successful at it. His high threat status cost the United States a lot of money. The day of 9/11 was very tragic that it startled the United States and lead to the decline of the economy. Due to the attack, policies were created along with a whole new department of Homeland Security that cost us trillions of dollars yet, it did end there. People began saying it was the U.S. fault that they brought it upon themselves by overreacting to Bin Laden as such a high threat. Critics say Bin Laden was not the entire reason for all that money spent, but the way we reacted towards it. The Iraq war was a major cause of America's economic decline. Waging the war cost nearly 3 trillion dollars; this was all money the United States did not have, which is why the deficits highly increased. In part this is true because Bin Laden was not looking to kill people, but kill our economy. This is can be proven from the many reports found that say Bin Laden never had any weapons of mass destruction. The only thing Bin Laden was going after was our economy. According to him, this was a better plan than simple attacks. Once again, this idea is reinforced in his ways of comparing Russia to the United States economically. In conclusion, Bin Laden was quite successful in ruining our economy. He knew that United States being the superpower it is, would have reacted the way it did, causing such a huge...
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...authorities. From this information citizens can decide if they are serving the public that they are meant to be helping. The information from the census also provides detailed statistics that are very important for communities and for businesses. The Census Bureau also reports the poverty data from several major household surveys. The census reported that in 2010 the poverty rate in the US was 15.1%. The report also showed a shocking decline of household incomes during the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Along with a decline in income, the number of people without health insurance increases as well. In the article written by Alyssa Davis, “Don’t Blame the Poor for the Faults of Our Economy” she states, “The truth is that the economy the poor are working in—an economy which has grown more and more unequal over the last several...
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...unemployment. The benefits from Social Security are used when a person is old enough to retire. Worker’s compensation benefits are available to workers that have been hurt on the job and are no longer able to work for a certain amount of time. Benefits that are available when a person is unemployed are only available if the person is terminated by no fault of their own. I have found that there is one major drawback to social insurance; the growth in our population. With an increase in population and a decrease in the job market, it is harder for people to go back to work when they have been laid off. Our economy at this point is still unstable. With more and more workers joining the workforce each day and our jobs being sent overseas it is easy to see the drawback to social insurance programs. The one drawback for Social Security according to Chambers & Wedel (2005) is that if we are to make it to the projected year of 2040, those who are in workforce will be forced to provide a higher amount of money out of their checks. I feel that any drawback related to social insurance funding is based upon the growth in population and the decrease in our...
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...Often as Americans it’s easy to place blame on the Government for spending more money than it actually makes, however the citizens of this country are equally at fault with overuse of credit cards. What is deficit spending and how does it work? A similar example to somewhat relate with can be explained by living about ones means. Spending more money than what is available is risky, furthermore it isn’t living within your means. A government can be at fault for spending more than it receives back just as a person can. Spending money can cause short term setbacks, yet if the long term yields returns it is justifiable. All deficit spending is not bad however, as it takes money to make money furthermore risk versus reward is sometimes...
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...in 2008. This drop in unemployment has cause the Euro to go up .13 cent which is a good to help boost the economy and make the Euro stronger against other foreign currency. This article is significant in our time because we here in the United States are going through a tough time with our ever increasing unemployment rate. Even though Germany is a much smaller country than the U.S. we could possible learn something from their recent success in dropping their unemployment rate. Germany’s success is based on the adding more short term jobs and reducing the work week to help reduce unemployment during the recession. This was a government sponsored program to help reduce the cost on employers and the government paid the rest of the cost for the reduction in work. Companies like BMW and Heidelberg Cement AG were able to increase the number of temporary jobs to help stimulate the economy which proved successful in their financial 2nd quarters. This relates to a lot of discussions that we have in class that were based on unemployment. Even though it is a totally different country they were faced with a lot of similar issues when it comes to unemployment. Germany has regulations on unemployment just like here in the U.S. Unemployment was created to help workers in need that have lost their employment by no fault of their own that meet particular qualifications. Our unemployment rate have climbed and continue to rise because the lack of work that is available here in the...
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...student loan default on higher education loans could cause another financial crisis in the United States because the loans are government backed, the cost of higher education is on the rise, and unemployment rates are on the rise preventing repayment. Taking on student loans can feel like and endless cycle of entrapment to the borrowers and they are often left with the belief that they have no other choice than to default on their loans. It is impossible to say with 100% certainty where the culpability lies for this unfolding crisis. One point of view is that the students may be at fault for not fully understanding the magnitude of the debt they are taking on by applying for these loans in the first place. Another point of view is that possibly the schools may be at fault for not offering more instruction to the borrowers about the loans and charging higher prices for tuition. Perhaps the fault is with the loan issuers for allowing the students to take on these loans even though there is no real surety that they will be paid off. Regardless of the...
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...tough-minded but never failing to assume that intelligence and will can move human society forward." An enlightening book by Barbara Ward namely “The Rich Nation and The Poor Nation” talks about the differentiation of countries toward each other. The book has six (6) chapters: The Rich Nations, The Poor Nations, Communism Blue Print, The Economics of Development, The Politics of Development, and lastly Not by Bread Alone. Individually, it discusses topics that may help the low-economy country to rise like the others. Each chapter, although individually implied, relate their discussions to one another. We live in a most catastrophically revolutionary age that men have ever faced. Revolutions is not what we think about an event or series of interconnected event but it is ideas that changes our ways of life, the way we look things, changes everything out of recognition and changing it fast. The distinction between rich nations and poor nations is one of the great dominant political and international themes of our country. Underdeveloped is not the best way to describe the poor nations because some of them had been in the great civilization. Communism is a sort of resume of the revolutions that make up mo0drenization and it offers a method of applying them speedily to societies caught fat in the dilemmas of transition. The Rich Nations talks about four revolutions that seem to weave their way in to countries that have good economic conditions. The first revolutionary idea is the revolution...
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...emotional emptiness, where human life has and given no value, where we danced away our sorrows, where we replaced grief with merriment, where our leaders party away while we die in hundreds, where casualty is lied about, and where terrorism is politicized at the expense of human lives. We should expect further less from a country that has been characterized despite its acclaimed democratization with inept leadership, nepotism, electoral malpractices, bigotry, religious crises, dishonesty, immorality, and favoritism among others. The problems facing the Nigerian nation-state are too many to mention but a few, the failure of leadership, unemployment, ethnicity and religious intolerance further disunite us, the lack of capacity to utilize natural resources, corruption which permeates not only every aspect of our political system but also, every aspect of our lives, and not long ago, militancy which leads to kidnapping, bunkering, and recently terrorism which has caused us more woes than any other. Though, they weren’t borne out of nothing, and it was as a result of causality, the principle that every event must have a cause. We’ve always played blame-game, and while the government, who is supposed to take responsibilities, blames others for it woes, citizens chose to fault the process in which those in government came into view. Have we ever thought of checking the inadequacies of those that occupied our political class, their...
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...their mortgage that they knew they would not be able to pay off, the homeowners acted unethically, taking a “rights” approach while they should have taken a “common good” approach. While many may argue that it was in fact the fault of the banks and brokers and lenders who convinced homeowners to make such unethical decisions, I believe in the end it is the end choice that matters rather than the process that brings you to that choice. The homeowners, in taking out a loan they knew they couldn’t pay, were taking a rights approach. They went by the notion that it was their right to freely choose what they do with their lives. However, this choice represents an ethical flaw it that it damages the economy and consequently many people. By taking such money out, the people were not keeping their end of the bargain and were acting selfishly purely to benefit their own needs of acquired land. This however resulted in a large surge of such ethical decisions and all came crashing down. This is due to the fact that everyone deemed it their right to act in a manner most fitting to their lives. However, while the rights approach can be applicable to causing ethical decisions in many situations, in the subprime-mortgage crisis it caused in the downfall of our nation’s economy. I argue that if the homeowners had taken the common good approach, they would have been able to maintain such a crisis and still benefited themselves. In considering the welfare of those around them and the possible vulnerability...
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...Administration (FAA) placed a solicitation for a one year construction contract to build a ten story office building for the FAA in the downtown area of Washington, DC. My company, Bell Construction, Inc. was awarded the $8 million contract in December of 2010. Our contracting officer, John Blair was responsible for administering the contract and ensuring that we met the completion date of December 30, 2011. My company officially started the project on January 2, 2011. The project went well for a couple of months considering we had our occasional bad weather of snow, rain and high winds but we had more than enough time to complete the project. As time went on the contract started to experience a couple of bumps in the road in terms of minor delays which were caused by the government or shall I say our contracting officer John Blair. In May of 2011, John informed us that the project will be delayed because the paperwork on his end was not complete and for safety purposes needed to halt the project. I found this to be totally unprofessional and unacceptable. Four months into the project and the foundation has been laid along with three levels of the building having already been completed and he was now concerned about our safety. John did not provide us with a reasonable timeframe as to when the work will restart or if we will be given an extension for completion. He asked us to standby for a couple of weeks until he gets more information. This project is very important because...
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