OPINIONISTA: State wage bill symptom – not cause – of government malaise By Xolisa Phillip
There must be something cathartic about repackaging an old guard as constituting a new dawn. A new dawn implies a new awakening, shedding old ways and reimagining your path – or even changing course entirely. Perhaps this explains why the euphoria of the promise of a new dawn died as quickly as it arose because cold, hard reality set in.
A summary of this topic goes something like this: the state has too much debt and one of its fastest-growing line items is its wage bill. And, therefore, there have been proposals to address this through a number of schemes, including instituting wholesale retrenchments. But this is where things get a bit murky: wielding the axe indiscriminately might be a counterintuitive measure that could cause more harm than good.
By all accounts, this was a depressing episode for the world economy. And all that panic, as well as recent democratisation at the time, precipitated most of the austerity programmes undertaken by countries in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. This wave, or phenomenon, struck mostly in the developing world, while the developed economies were able to absorb the shocks – or so the historical record shows.
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