JOHN MANYIKE & ISAAC MATSHEGO | SA students offer fresh insights on economic policy

SA is preparing for thebudget speechon Wednesday, and the usual analysis will rightly focus on fiscal numbers, policy trade-offs, and macroeconomic conditions. Yet one of the most valuable perspectives often sits outside the immediate spotlight: how emerging economists understand these choices and how they believe policy should respond to the country’s lived economic realities. The Nedbank and Old Mutual budget speech competition offers a rare window into this thinking.

This year’s undergraduate and postgraduate submissions revealed a generation that is neither ideological nor simplistic. Instead, students demonstrate a nuanced appreciation of economic tradeoffs, institutional limits, and the complexity of policy implementation. At the undergraduate level, entrants interrogated whether trade protectionism, notably higher import tariffs, can realistically stimulate job creation in a developing economy such as SA.

Their responses show a clear departure from binary debates. Rather than advocating for blanket protectionism or uncritical liberalisation, many students argue for targeted, temporary and performance-linked interventions. A recurring insight is that tariffs may offer short-term relief to vulnerable sectors but cannot substitute for deeper structural reform.

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Students consistently highlight that without reliable infrastructure, skills development, efficient logistics, and policy certainty, protective measures risk entrenching inefficiency rather than enabling competitiveness. Several essays point out that tariffs can, without intention, raise input costs for downstream industries. The result would be the erosion of employment gains elsewhere in the economy.

In this sense, students caution against viewing trade policy as a silver bullet for unemployment. From the perspective of a financial institution, it is important to situate this argument within SA’s broader labour market reality. SA’sunemployment challenge is deeply structural, shaped by skills mismatches, spatial inequality, and long-standing infrastructure constraints.

Trade policy alone cannot resolve these challenges; well-targeted infrastructure development has the potential to play a catalytic role. Large-scale investment in areas such as energy, transport, water and digital infrastructure can create labour-intensive employment in the short-to-medium term.

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