South Africa’s Economic and Fiscal Quagmire: A Political and Insurrectionary Dilemma as Rating Agencies Downgrade the South African Economy and Minister of Finance Fired by the President Without any Tangible Reasons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This narrative attempts to deal with the title of the paper in terms of the South Africa’s economic and fiscal quagmire and crisis. In no way is the paper all inclusive because, it cannot capture all of the subtle nuances that encompass this vexing issue, nearly two decades after the dawn and road to democracy, post 1994. The Finance Minister is in a no win situation and has to play the tune of his political masters. The Ministers mid-term review tabled to the nation in October, 2015 shows that he has to walk a very tight rope because of the current account, fiscal deficit and points to the reality that the business outlook is bleak. The reality question is, is it economic power or political power? The downgrade risks that the country faces on the part of rating agencies makes Minister Nene’s Job even more trickier and therefore, faces a near impossible balancing act’ to appease rating agencies. Can the Minister keep the credit agency wolves from the Treasury door? South Africa is in an economic and fiscal turmoil as it dips into savings to pay its monthly bills and therefore, reserve funds are being diverted into bureaucrats’ salaries. It is not only the question of the prolonged economic meltdown, but in reality it has to do with the mismanagement of the economy by the ruling government. The very high levels of corruption, cronyism, a mismatch in policy imperatives, the failure to action holistically the National Development Plan (NDP) and, a number of variables that have placed South Africa in this extreme quagmire, exacerbated by increasing unemployment, depressing poverty levels and rising inequality. The only solution is to deal decisively with corruption and to generate rapid growth by means of policy certainty. Against this background the paper will attempt to discuss these and other scenarios that confront South Africa.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".