Water Wheel September/October 2019

Abstract

Empowering water and sanitation industrialisation as a route to economic recovery South Africa’s economy is being tossed like a cork in the stormy waters of an unprecedented and violent recalibration of the global economy. Some argue that this is a natural reaction to the adjustment from a unipolar single superpower world of twenty years ago to the one of multiple centres of power – economic, political and military – as we have today. This is especially severe as the old mitigation mechanisms of robust multilateral instruments, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation are diluted as twenty-first century nationalism has become the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm. But, South Africa, on most indices, appears to be wealthy. The rankings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have South Africa as the 31st largest economy in the world based on the size of GDP . That puts South Africa in the top 15% globally in terms of the size of its economy.

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