Two major surveys in the past few days have provided a rare glimpse into the state of the real economy, including the views of thousands of international and more than 50 South African CEOs as well as input from 12,000 private companies.

ON WEDNESDAY evening 220 investors and asset managers logged a call to have Leon Kirkinis convince them there was still life in the African Bank Investments Limited (Abil) body after a week-long R6bn hemorrhage.

The rand has been on the back foot all year, weighed down by weak global demand and plagued by a host of growth-sapping local factors

The topic of transformation has – once again – divided our nation. Whether it relates to the appointment of judges or whether apartheid can still be blamed for the ills of our government, we need a continued rational debate on this topic.

Dr Jonathan Lawley from the Business Council for Africa in the UK shares his main conclusions from his experiences of running a programme in African mining countries.

It is often easy to become pessimistic, or even fatalistic, about South Africa. It is also hard to escape the fact that there are, sometimes, valid reasons for such pessimism and fatalism.

Pravin Gordhan’s 2013 budget reflects the difficulty of reversing the growing addiction to the welfare drug.

How long have black economic empowerment and employment equity got to continue as the cornerstone of black progress in South Africa?

World Bank Chief Economist and Vice President for Development Economics, Professor Kaushik Basu, says the world ought to go towards creating a co-ordinated micro economy.

In the case of the challenges of unemployment, overwhelming evidence shows that government is not the solution, government is the problem.