South Africa's economic decline and the ruling party's waning support will continue to deter the implementation of structural economic reforms, portending persistently low growth through the 2024 election and beyond. South Africa, the most developed country in sub-Saharan Africa, is in a long-term state of economic decline. The country's real GDP growth is projected to fall to 0.1% in 2023 from 2% in 2022, averaging 1.4% between 2010 and 2022. For the most advanced economy in sub-Saharan Africa, such a ten-year trend is troubling; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that the average emerging market economy's real GDP growth rate in 2023 will fall to 2.8% from 3.4% in 2022. On top of low growth, South Africa has a mounting public debt problem, made worse by IMF predictions that the fiscal balance will take on a wider deficit of about 6.5% of GDP in the 2023-24 fiscal year (up from...
