The National Development Plan (NDP) does not go far enough in dealing with economic challenges, Oxfam SA’s economic justice manager Ayabonga Cawe said on Monday.
Speaking during the release of Oxfam’s international inequality report, he said it was a "false assumption" that GDP growth should be the primary goal of policy making.
The NDP uses GDP as a yardstick to deal with unemployment and inequality.
"It’s necessary to measure output growth, but it’s not sufficient," he said.
GDP growth did not give a full picture of the country’s social health, said Cawe, who was part of a seven-person panel deliberating on the proposed national minimum wage.
The NDP measured key economic success as SA achieving GDP growth of more than 5% in the belief that it would reduce unemployment and inequality.
"In that regard, the NDP has not gone [far] enough to understand that some of the key challenges that SA has, even if you were to measure by output growth, are structural and long-term," Cawe said. Some of the issues ratings agencies were looking at were not short-or medium-term but embedded in structural issues in SA’s political economy, which required a much bigger focus than just on GDP growth.
One of the "false assumptions" on which the economy of the world’s top 1% of people in terms of wealth was built, was that GDP growth should be the primary goal of policymaking.
Oxfam’s report was released ahead of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa is leading SA’s delegation.
The report, "An economy for the 99%", showed that the gap between rich and poor was far greater than feared, the organisation said.
SA was still one of the most unequal countries in the world, Cawe said. The richest 1% of the population has 42% of the total wealth, while the total net wealth of just three billionaires in SA is equivalent to that of the bottom 50% of the population, according to Oxfam.
Globally, eight men owned as much wealth as the 3.6-billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity.
The biggest causes of this inequality globally, according to the report, were companies working for those at the top, squeezing workers and producers, dodging tax and buying politicians and crony capitalism.
"Broken economies" were funnelling wealth to a rich elite at the expense of the poorest and the world could see its first trillionaire in just 25 years, when one in 10 people survived on less than $2 a day.
"To put this figure in perspective, you would have expected to be spending $1m every day for 2,738 years to spend $1-trillion."
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