Abstract:

South Africa’s 2025 Budget has revealed challenges and vulnerabilities within the Government of National Unity, and it has brought to the surface tensions in the budget decision process that have been largely dormant during thirty years of ANC hegemony. Government budgeting inherently blends technocratic evidence with political judgement, across an extraordinarily wide span of programmes and activities. While policy analysis and evidence are unavoidably incomplete and imperfect, their intersection with political and ideological influences is often decisive. This presentation explores the boundaries between technical analysis, budget processes, bureaucratic interests, political imperatives and broader social and economic dynamics - with the 2025 Budget as a case study and perhaps an inflection point in the political economy of South Africa’s public finances.

About the presenter:

Andrew Donaldson is an economist and research associate of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. He is a former head of the Budget Office and the Public Finance divisions of the South African National Treasury and served as the inaugural head of the Government Technical Advisory Centre.

Andrew is a graduate of Stellenbosch University, UNISA and Cambridge University.  He has published in the fields of demography, economics of education, social policy, macroeconomics and public finance and worked on employment creation, land restitution and education systems planning before joining the Department of Finance in 1993. He contributed to the work of the Katz Commission on tax policy, served on the Committee of Inquiry into a National Health Insurance System, and was a member of the team that drafted the 1996 macroeconomic strategy. He was responsible for the introduction of a medium-term expenditure framework in 1998 and led the subsequent reform of the budget process and restructuring of budget documentation. After retiring from the National Treasury in 2018 he served as an advisor to the Association for Savings and Investment of South Africa and has taught at the UCT School of Economics. His current work is focused on growth, employment policy and social security reform.

Kind regards,

SALDRU