Project Description
South Africa Private Sector Competitiveness Project (PSCP) is one of a number of projects in a Program developed upon request of the Government of South Africa. The Program seeks to address key investment climate and structural challenges facing the South African economy such as poor regulation, government interventions that do not provide firms with the ability and incentives to enter and compete, and negative investor perceptions. The Program is fully aligned with the 2018 South Africa Strategic Country Diagnostics (SCD) and will seek to contribute to addressing the unemployment and poor economic growth that South Africa's National Development Plan (NDP) 2030 identifies as principal development challenges. The project will aim at addressing key investment and growth challenges by focusing on a number of horizontal and vertical sectoral reforms with special attention to SMEs. The Project will be further calibrated to reflect findings from the Country Private Sector Diagnostics (CPSD) and the Enterprise Survey (ES) both of which will identify sector specific investment opportunities and obstacles.
The project will achieve its objectives by : (I) Addressing government interventions that hinder competition in key markets in South Africa and promoting competition policies to combat anticompetitive business practices ; (ii) Addressing investment policy and promotion constraints at the subnational level and promoting more robust and focused investment strategies; (iii) Tackling key horizontal and sectoral business climate constraints and barriers to transparency, predictability, and efficiency, to increase investment; and (iv) conducting surveys and diagnostics to inform future policy for South Africa that support SMEs and investments.