Government failure and state incapacity: The South African public sector in the 1990s

In their editorial introduction to the 1994 'Special Issue' of the 'South African Journal of Economic History' devoted to a sectoral analysis of the South African economy during the 1980s, Stuart Jones and Jon Inggs described this period as a "lost decade", with per capita incomes even lower in 1990 than they had been in 1980.¹ Moreover, "no other Western country experienced a comparable decline in the 1980s and South Africa herself had never experienced anything like it since the formation of Union in 1910".² Thus, from the perspective of economic growth, the decade of the nineties could not have had a less auspicious beginning.