 Thanks very much. I'm just turning on my camera here. Basani has been having issues joining us. She is now phoning me, which unfortunately is not gonna work. So she's been having tech issues. So my name's Gillard Isaacs. I work at the Institute for Economic Justice, a policy think tank in South Africa. I see that Basani is now online, which is fantastic. And we've been doing work on COVID-19 since the outset. For the audience, I've been thinking how to frame what I'm going to say. And what I really would like to try and contextualize is the utter failure of the South African state to respond adequately to the COVID-19 crisis. In particular, economically speaking now, despite a proactive public health intervention at the outset, the economic response has been completely inadequate. And I'm going to contextualize that within two ideas. The first is on South Africa neoliberalism and how that has played out. There has always been in South Africa, as is true elsewhere, attention between more progressive or interventionist policies and market-centric policies. In South Africa, this is shaped by the internal contradictions within the ruling ANC and their engagement with business and a business elite. And the boundaries of this neoliberal orthodoxy is in particular policed by the national treasury and South African reserve bank. And whilst COVID-19 has disrupted and weakened some of these, it has not displaced them. At the same time, that is combined with severe inadequacies in state capacity. And this is not simply arbitrary. There is of course within neoliberalism a selective incapacity within states. And so that's really frames what I think explains the policy that we've seen unfold. I'm going to switch between sharing a screen and not. I am showing a graph now, which I am going to assume that everyone can see unless I get interrupted by the chairperson. So what we note here is the COVID cases. And we see this initial spike. And that first spike is mainly due to wealthier tourists and business persons coming back from abroad and from Europe in particular. And a very hard lockdown, one of the most severe lockdowns globally is then instituted. And that lasts for different guises about a six week period as shown here. And that accounts for the significant dip in infections. And of course the idea of that lockdown pair, originally three weeks and then two weeks is to prepare the public health response. What we've seen subsequently is a gradual opening up of economic and social activity through a staged process of moving from a level five lockdown to level four to level three to what's now called advanced level three, which is basically just level two. And we've seen this steady rise in infections. And this shows South Africa in relation to a range of other countries. The trend and similarity with India is particularly disturbing at the moment. And when I gave a presentation on an Ideas webinar, Jayat T. Ghosh noted the similarities, both in infection and in policy. So that's what the trajectory of the virus looks like here. What does that mean economically speaking? Well, the estimated fall in GDP ranges anywhere from around minus six to up to minus 17. So we're looking at a very significant fall of which a contraction of about 10% is extremely plausible. We're looking at job losses in excess of a million workers in a country with an expanded unemployment rate of almost 40% that's a severe crisis. So initially the South African response was extremely weak. What I'm showing now is an illustration of spending as a share of GDP as of the start of April, which is when our lockdown had started. And South Africa is a tiny share of that expenditure at like 0.1% compared to a G20 average, which is a hundred times larger than that. After much advocacy and contestation, the president announced on the 21st of April a 500 billion rand stimulus package, which if you divide by 20 is roughly the number of pounds, which my brain is not quite doing at the moment. And this was heralded as a significant step forward. If we look what this means in practice is this would increase South Africa's expenditure as a share of GDP and place it amongst, in some ways, international norms. The spending was divided up into various elements, health, municipal support for water, sanitation, increased in social grants, which is our form of social security. This job advancement program with the details of which remain completely obscure, wage guarantees to help pay workers wages as exist in the UK, and then various loan guarantees and tax deferrals. Now I want to point to two issues with this, which I think are illustrative of what I was referring to. The first is that these measures even before the second incident which I'll refer to had been extremely poorly implemented. The rollout of a new social grant to benefit anyway between eight and 13 million people within six weeks had 10 people who had been paid out. The increase to our existing child support grant was lower than initially expected. The type of wage support has at best reached under a third of the workforce with 60% of the allocated funds spent. The health spending was failing to materialize with an absence of PPE across public healthcare facilities. So a real significant inability to roll out this package. The second element which I'll point to is that on Wednesday we had the tabling of our adjusted budget is essentially a budget framework meant to give extra to this rescue package. And what we actually saw and this is led by our national treasury, apologize for this dense slide, our fact sheet on this is still in the works. But essentially this 500 billion has been whittled down to a net increase of 36 billion. This is because some of it's failed to materialize. A large portion of it has actually been reallocated existing expenditure and such substantial portion is in loan guarantees, which is not new expenditure. In addition to the fact that only 36 billion is new expenditure, the budget actually plans to implement significant budget cuts over the three year medium term expenditure framework. So essentially we're seeing in the midst of a crisis the acceleration of austerity. This includes elements even like the health like response in which we only see about three billion in new expenditure. So that's an example of the type of responses which we've seen. I'm not gonna really go through, there are a number of other slides, but I wanna sort of finally say two last points. We've tried to look at this package and assess it based on international best practice, which is that it should be early large target households be simple to administer insure survival and then target particular sectors within the economy. And most aspects largely fail on all of those scores. On the monetary policy side, we once again have seen the adherence to the existing orthodoxies. We have seen a interest rate cuts significant but not startling. We have seen some bond buying in the secondary markets, but not expensive quantitative easing program. There's been no serious conversation of instituting capital controls, of requiring the prescribed landings from pension funds, no developmental landings within our developmental finance institutions and a range of other weak responses. So whilst we have had a extremely strict lockdown, we've had one of the world's weakest economic responses. And so whilst COVID-19 does offer an opportunity to try and disrupt the economic orthodoxies present, thus far those traditional centers of power have managed to exercise influence over economic policy in South Africa. I'm gonna leave it there. Thanks very much. Thank you so much Gillard for your contribution. That was really interesting to follow through. We will now hand over to Bassani Maloi to actually talk about the informal sector. And then after that, we will have questions from the audience. Feel free if you already have questions or Gillard subtopic, feel free to already post them in the chat. Thank you. Hi, I think we're trying to get through to Bassani. Bassani, can you hear us? Bassani, it does show you as unmuted and your microphone as active. I don't know if you can turn on your camera at the bottom of the main screen. Hi everyone. Bassani, you have to turn the sound off on your computer. Okay, so I have Bassani who wants to try, apologies everyone, she wants to try and speak through my phone on my microphone. Bassani, you have to mute me now or else there's feedback. Hello? Yes, that's better. Let's see if this works. I can hear you, but if you can hear me, that's a problem because you need to mute your computer. I'll still be feedback. In terms of sharing screen, I've sent you a photograph. If you can hear me, have a look on the bottom right, there's a purple arrow. And if you click on that purple arrow and then there's the third icon is share content. And then the second option is share application screen. We can't hear you now. So your microphone needs to be, I think we're losing, your microphone needs to be on, but your speaker off. Okay, I am sharing it Bassani. Is it possible? Okay, we have the slides. Perhaps I could make a suggestion, which is that we take any sort of conversation around what I may have put forward. And in the meantime, Bassani tries to sort out the connection. Okay, so I see there's some comments in the chat. Is Sibolele with us? Yes, hi. I'm just turning on my microphone. Hi. Hello. Sorry. Hi. I think that's a good suggestion, Gillard. So I think one of the questions from the audience is what is the trajectory for the COVID cases and what potential impact will that have on the GDP? So I think from the South African point of view, the peak will probably be around August, September. So if the cases continue to peak, what is your sort of estimated impact on the GDP? Okay, thanks. Yeah, so you're absolutely right that the expected peak is now been brought forward to like around August. The estimations of impact on GDP, I mean, as with other countries, there's a lot of guesswork which goes on here. We've done our own input output modeling with for the ILO and I would say sort of, and then there's all sorts of other private sector modeling from various banks and research agencies and so on, as well as the official IMF modeling. I would say that an estimate of about 10% of GDP is a safe estimate. The sort of estimates range between minus five and minus 15. So we're talking about a really significant hit. And of course we're talking about this hit in the context of a economy which was already in recession and of course has some of the world's highest levels of inequality and then significant unemployment and poverty. I see there's a question here also on the public reception and that the public service that Lucy had has problems and how are the institutions delivering these? So I mean, what was interesting was that there was widespread frustration prior to the April 21st announcement of the rescue package. We coordinated the signing of an open letter to the president which about 300 economists signed on and so there was economists from across the spectrum, business persons, unionists, civil society, all saying relatively similar things which we had seen elsewhere, which was support wages, increased social security, have business support measures, increase health spending and so on. And it took obviously, it took three weeks before anything was announced and five weeks before anything was implemented and the announcement was generally greeted with positivity including by ourselves. That gradually faded with the failure to implement and that failure to implement has been both institutional weaknesses but it's also been around the design where they've placed the responsibilities, what type of funding has been allocated to institutional support. So the failure is not simply a, well, we don't have enough hands at laptops to institute the resources that are needed thus I would say it's that sort of interaction between the particular policy orientations and capacity issues. Thank you for that. Let's see if Bassani has actually managed to turn on her microphone. Hi, Bassani, is the audio better? Hello. I think her video is working but not the audio for now. So maybe we can ask maybe one last question to Gillette and see offline how we can actually best support both. We have another question from Mary. So do you, from your opinion, from your research, Gillette, are there any industries that are worse off than others given the current lockdown? Yeah, I mean, I think, Mary, the response is probably somewhat similar to elsewhere in the world. And what's really interesting, in a perverse kind of way about COVID-19 is that whereas in many recessionary and crises environment, the service sectors are ones which remain quite active. We saw this after the 2007 AIDS crisis in retail, in food and so on. So, but obviously in COVID, those sectors are significantly hard hit because they are high contact sectors and therefore are because of the lockdown imposed. So we've seen similar trends. The type of real-time data available is less in South Africa than in the US. So we don't have unemployment claim figures per industry and so on just yet. But what we're going to see is the spread and the spikes in other relatively close contact sectors also. So we'll see them in mining. There's been a few spikes already due to the proximity and conditions within which workers operate and then like elsewhere in healthcare and other frontline services. So, yeah, I would say that gives a picture of where some of the sort of worst hit sectors are. The last thing I would say is again, similar to some other countries, the business size is also an influencing factor despite the fact that a number of support measures are targeted allegedly at small and medium enterprises. Many of them are the type of measures which are difficult for small and medium enterprises to actually access. So for instance, accessing the various tax relief measures require fairly cumbersome accounting and form filling out and so on, which of course large firms have their fleets of accountants available. The wage support mechanisms also are overly complicated. So we'll see a, so there's a significant sort of hit to small and medium enterprises also. I mean, I think your point skillet are very valid. So as a suggestion, I guess in terms of the long term, what would you say is needed, what action is needed by the South African government to mitigate these time lags between the policy proposal and the implementation. So what we're understanding is that it seems that there's some institutional blockers that actually hinder these policies from being implemented in the media group. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Just before answering that, I just wanted to add to my previous comment and it's a shame that like Bassani's had the issues which she has, because Bassani's focus was going to be on the informal sector of which she knows more than I do. But it's another sector, which has been particularly hard hit both by the natural playing out of how the virus operates, but also through policy measures where there was a favoring, for example, of formal sector supermarkets over informal food suppliers and a general kind of dismissal of the importance of the informal sector in South Africa. And probably the hardest hit workers were informal sector workers because formal sector workers have the ability to continue to earn money despite lockdown and also the sorry, all the messages are distracting me. And informal workers are insufficiently covered through our employment insurance and other measures like that. In terms of the kind of way forward, you know, I think that the crisis again, like elsewhere offers a very important integration between short and medium and long-term measures which are needed. What do we of course need in South Africa is a transformation of the structure of the economy. Structural transformation is insufficiently advanced in South Africa. We suffer from both headline statistics of higher unemployment poverty, et cetera, but also a crisis in all care economies related social crises like gender-based violence and a range of social ills which stem from a dysfunctional economy. And what we've argued is that what we need to do is see the rescue package elements as being in stepping stones and indicative of what longer transformations might be able to look like. And so for example, the expansion of social grants through the supposed new special COVID-19 grant which has so far largely been a failure has the potential to lay a foundation for a basic income grant and for the further expansion of our social security sector. The expansionary, if we were to succeed in expansionary fiscal and monetary policy, this could lay a foundation for the form of fiscal stimulus which South Africa needs. And then we, so we need to start in some ways with these immediate measures, but they need to be framed in a way which also opens up opportunities. In the medium to long-term, and a number of groups and individuals, including ourselves, are advancing the notion of a just recovery, one which places human and environmental sustainability at the heart of what the economy should be about moving forward, right? And that means the expansion of the public sector, a renewal of the commons, a move to renewable energy, a dressing of our care economies and restructuring of the sort of productive structure of the South African economy amongst other elements. And of course that's a sort of wholesale kind of overall, but we've got to try and leverage this moment to try and tie it to those transformative policies. Subbu, I see the other question, yeah. Yes, we have some other questions. I just wanted to check quickly if Bassani is able to join us or we'll just keep moving on to other questions. Hello, it seems like I think she's still having some technical difficulties. I also can't get through to her right now. So we have another question about capital controls. So do you know why there hasn't been so much of a big push actually use capital controls during the COVID crisis? Yeah, I mean, thanks Sarah for that question. I think there's a few different dimensions here. The first is just an ideological inertia. South African economic policy tends to be five, 10 years behind everywhere else. We were instituting the Washington consensus in the mid 1990s when it was really being critiqued elsewhere, right? And the type of resistance to unconventional economic policies is extremely entrenched in particular within the two entities responsible for such management the National Treasury and the Reserve Bank in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008. I have a sample of 16 comparative emerging markets. South Africa was one of only two countries to further liberalize financial markets rather than institute controls. So this is a longstanding issue. At the same time, there is I think I think that South Africa's integration into global financial markets needs to be altered and renegotiated. The type of capital controls and capital management techniques given the fact that South Africa is a small open economy which unfortunately is reliant on capital inflows at the moment to balance its current account does mean that the implementation of those would need to be done in a sequenced way and in a way which sort of made sense in context. What the Reserve Bank and National Treasury do is simply say no, we're not doing that. What some advocates of capital control seem to imply is that you could just have this wholesale sort of closing, which I also don't think is the solution. And that I'm not sure we've successfully advanced what those controls would look like and how they would be implemented. Great, and we have a, I don't know if Eileen's question is complete, but I don't know if this really can also tie in with the current economic transformation, the topic of land redistribution into Africa. I know it's going a little bit off topic, but what is the place for that in the mid to long-term economic time in South Africa? Yeah, I think, and unfortunately, I think Eileen just left us, but I think it's, you know, the land question is really multifaceted and it ties into a number of issues. So firstly, there's the difference between talking about rural or farming or semi-rural land and urban land, right? And both require significant reform and both actually link both to the causes, consequences and warnings which COVID-19 offer. So for instance, anyone who has visited South Africa and lands at an airport will see that you then drive to the city centres and on either side of you are large informal settlements, particularly in Cape Town on that route, but pretty much everywhere, and that the apartheid spatial geographies have displaced the people both in terms of where they are and in terms of how they live, right? And that's not unrelated to what we've seen in COVID-19. It's not unrelated in the sense that you can't physically distance if one lives in a shack. It's not unrelated in the sense that if you are on in a public taxi for an hour and a half to and from work every day, that exposes you to significant risk. So the COVID crisis illustrates the fragilities within that. It illustrates the fragilities within our rural land and farming land division areas also, for instance on issues of food security and informal food trading. And so COVID-19, the question of land and the geographies in South Africa is certainly revealed within COVID-19. But the fragilities are really important because COVID-19 is a precursor for the type of crisis we might face with climate change. And these elements will once again become really, really pertinent. And the distribution of land where people live, how they move in what physical infrastructure definitely have an influence in vulnerability with in-climate crisis. So absolutely we need to think holistically about what it means to recover from this. The last thing I'll say, because I know I am going on a lot, but I think it's a useful way of thinking about this elsewhere, is we're soon to put out a brief which argues that you should understand comorbidities of COVID, not only in a physical health sense that there is diabetes or you have a lung problem, but that there are social comorbidities that if you live in a shack, if you use transport of that kind and so on, it exposes you to far more risks then if you have the kind of lifestyle which I am privileged to. And so we need to consider recovery and reform of our economies with a holistic notion of what risks are. Thank you so much for that, Dylan. So I don't think we're able to reach Pasani. So what we might do is have her recorded talk and then we just upload it as well with the recording of today's session. So I'll just, if anyone in the audience actually has a question for Dylan before we end of the session, since no questions are coming through. So I think I have a question coming from you for you, Dylan. I think you talked a lot about some people, some sectors that are more at risk. Do you have maybe at the Institute for Economic Justice, because this is also a question I've just been receiving from colleagues internationally, do you have any indication what the pandemic has had on gender inequalities, especially gender-based violence? I know it's currently a big topic right now in South Africa. People are also listening. However, I think there hasn't been such a big connection in terms of how it is actually putting more pressure or more risk to people who are already vulnerable in this regard. So maybe you can talk a little bit more about that. No, thanks. And I think that's really important. I mean, I've alluded to the crises of care and in gender-based violence, but I welcome the chance to sort of profile it as an issue. I think there's a few elements here. The first is that COVID and one of our researchers, Sonja Falatze, wrote an op-ed about this, which I would encourage everyone to read, that COVID highlights the various crises of care faced in the South African economy. So South Africa not only has there been just a soldering of care work by women, but there's been an ability of wealthier households to transfer that onto poor black women in particular. And so what we have seen is that the... So in two ways, the domestic work sector itself has been hard hit economically, but importantly, the crisis has exacerbated the care responsibilities which women predominantly face, whether that is like elsewhere, whether it is in childcare, with schools closed, but a really insufficient socialization of care responsibility so that the state carries far too little of those responsibilities. So whether that's in childcare, elderly care, food provision, water collection, and so on. At the same time, the collapse in social services, as we know, disproportionately impacts women. On the issue of gender-based violence, I think that both the physical nature of lockdowns places women at significant risk, but more broadly, the economic collapse of an economy potentially has a long-term danger in exacerbating this. Without making any excuses, what is gender-based violence in South Africa? It's predominantly lower-income men who in their own way have been exploited by the economic system or in their own way are just possessed of various things who are taking that out in a way whose own anger and violence and mental trauma is being acted out on women in our society. And that's absolutely reprehensible. But what it points to is the fact that if our economy and our society unravels further, and if men experience further violence by the economic system, then the violence which is perpetrated on women will only increase. And so it's of extreme concern that we both need to change our individual behaviors as men, but we also need to change the system within we live and operate. Thank you for that answer. That's also very useful too in terms of just profiling the specific problem that we have in South Africa. I think we've reached the time now for our webinar and from us it's so as I would like to say thank you very much for a very insightful and engaging talk. We'll be able to post the recording on Facebook and Twitter and hopefully we can also get a recording from Basani Deloy. And also everyone else, thank you so much for joining our webinar series. We have our very last one unfortunately, happening on the 7th of July. So we hope to see some of you guys there. Thank you very much. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you.