South Africa

When: 2024–2025

Purpose: Strengthen South Africa’s capacity to use OG-ZAF for long-run analysis of fiscal policy, social spending, economic reforms, debt sustainability, and sustainable post-pandemic recovery strategies.

What happened: UN DESA launched OG-Core project activities in Cape Town in August 2024 and held a second training workshop in March 2025. Participants worked on model structure, data integration, calibration, policy simulations, and interpretation. Public materials identify simulations and policy applications around VAT increases, spending cuts, national health insurance, education and social development, distributional impacts of VAT increases, international capital-flow shocks, productivity improvements, carbon tax options, pension changes, and debt sustainability. The repository example compares a baseline with a reform that sets the corporate income tax rate to 30%.

Key insights: The South Africa work highlights the importance of assessing reforms in an economy with major social benefit programmes and a constrained tax base. OG-ZAF links reforms to GDP, investment, consumption, demographics, worker productivity, labor, capital, wages, interest rates, and tax revenue. Key repository graphs compare baseline and reform paths for GDP, consumption, capital, labor, interest rates, and wages, while the workshop materials emphasize debt sustainability, crowding out, and inequality as central policy questions.

Resources: Repository, model documentation, and training documentation.

Models: OG-Core

Stakeholders: UN DESA, National Treasury of South Africa, UN Resident Coordinator’s Office, Trade Law Centre (tralac), government agencies, academic institutions, Richard W. Evans, Jason DeBacker, and Marcelo LaFleur.