ANA reports that Nobel laureate Paul Romer on Monday described South Africa as an "economic disappointment", citing the high levels of unemployment among the country's youth, calling it a "human catastrophe".
Romer was a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences and was also at one time a chief economist at the World Bank. "It's a very hard story because there was this political miracle in this country which was then followed by economic disappointment and the thing I would point to is not so much the outsiders, but the under-utilisation of human talent in South Africa," Romer said at the fourth annual meeting of New Development Bank (NDB) in Cape Town. Romer told delegates that SA should not wait for educational reform but should rather get more people into jobs. "Wages grow with years on the job, people learn on the job so a system that denies people a chance to have a job ... this is just a waste of human talent and it’s just a crushing mistake for the people involved," he said
- Read Chantall Presence’s original report on the above at Independent News
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