Ten tips for reporters on understanding tax and statutory Budgets, particularly the national Budget.

What pitfalls should journalists be aware of when handling numbers? We take a look at some, and offer some advice.

12 tips for economists and researchers to engage journalists effectively.

List of important economic phrases and their Zulu and Xhosa equivalents. Translations supplied by the South African Reserve Bank.

General tips for improving economics and business journalism

There are a number of ways of looking at inflation. One definition is that inflation is simply the erosion of the buying power of a currency. You now need around R150 to buy what R10 in 1980 could buy.

Reg Rumney June 25 2010   So far, private enterprise has done much better at transferring ownership into black hands than the parastatals. This is particularly true of Telkom, which reportedly has come under pressure because it does not meet the government’s requirements for the telecommunications sector of a 30% BEE stake.   There are a number of reasons why the parastatals lag. Th...

Local coverage of the Nigerian banking crisis doesn’t quite add up, writes Reg Rumney.   What a parochial bunch we are when it comes to African business. I had to be alerted by someone who is in touch with continental finance, to the biggest banking scandal in decades. The South African news media have not entirely missed the banking troubles in Nigeria; but we only became interested b...

Reg Rumney - Aug 05 2009BEE deals -- or their absence -- in some important areas of the economy show the weak links in government's black economic empowerment drive.Retailing is one such area. Here, it could be argued, the state does not have as much leverage through procurement and licensing to bring about BEE deals as it does in other areas, such as IT, for example. Retailers sell to consum...

Reg Rumney - Aug 28 2009It should not surprise anyone that SABMiller's R6-billion BEE scheme showed all the nimble thinking that has kept the brewer king of the Castle (excuse the pun) in South Africa. This equity transaction, one of the "broadest-based" yet, also aims to ensure the loyalty of the small taverners who are SABMiller's frontline troops in the country. In addition, it...

Reg Rumney - October 30 2009Once again it strikes me how the headlines on the big black economic empowerment deals mislead. You can almost sympathise with Julius Malema when he says of BEE: "We are free to buy shares, with what?" A deal transferring 25% over five or 10 years will most probably mean that 10% or less actually ends up in the hands of the BEE beneficiaries at the end o...

Reg Rumney - September 28 2009Poet and communist Jeremy Cronin suggested recently that the subprime crisis at the heart of the global financial crisis was similar to BEE deals. The deputy minister of transport and deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party was speaking at a teach-in at Rhodes University, arranged by the politics department and my centre for econo...

For months, SABC’s Interface programme called on viewers to vote in an SMS poll. The results were then delivered by the presenter during the show, in percentages — like “40% agree with the statement, and 60% disagree”.Whether a particular percentage was of a universe of 10 SMS messages — or 10 000, we weren’t told. Of course, it makes quite a difference as to whether the tallies represented four “...

By, Reg Rumney - Mar 16 2007. Can it be that BEE, coupled with affirmative action, is retarding African entrepreneurship -- and ironically spurring white people to take the plunge into running their own businesses? Let's be clear that entrepreneurship here entails innovation and risk-taking and contributes to economic development rather than being simply the art of spotting a gap.There is some evi...

By, Reg Rumney- Mar 19 2007.What lies ahead this year in the area of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which concerns business and its role in society, and corporate social investment (CSI), which refers to the grant-making or corporate giving aspect of CSR?BEE will at once make both CSR and CSI more problematic, but also present new opportunities, this year as the BEE Codes of Good Practice ...

By, Reg Rumney- Jul 31 2007. National Empowerment Fund (NEF) chief executive Philisiwe Buthelezi has described the fund's offer of discounted shares in MTN as "unique, exciting and historic". There have been other retail offerings reserved exclusively for black people over the years, most recently Telkom's Khulisa scheme. The prospect of getting a piece of a company that has shown spectacular gro...

By, Reg Rumney- Jul 31 2006. When the De Beers black economic empowerment (BEE) deal was announced last year, Cheryl Carolus could be described as not being "one of the usual suspects". Not now. In a short time Carolus, former ambassador to London and darling of those nostalgic for the optimistic non-racialism of the United Democratic Front, has become a firm BEE favourite.Carolus, Dolly Mokgatle,...

Reg Rumney - Aug 14 2007. Two progress reports on BEE in the past week appear to come to startingly different conclusions. Is the empowerment glass half-full or almost empty?Still, it is encouraging that a start has been made on measurement.Recently, Business Report quoted the Presidential Black Business Working Group, which met President Thabo Mbeki last Friday, as finding established companies'...

By, Reg Rumney - Oct 25 2007BEE charters and the broad-based BEE codes of good practice might move corporate social investment (CSI) into the boardroom as a serious subject of discussion. The codes represent a kind of supercharter, with which all charters will have to be "aligned". Industries and businesses are scored according to a balanced scorecard with seven elements, of which socio-economic d...

By, Reg Rumney- Mar 25 2008. How much is black economic empowerment (BEE) political patronage rather than a rational political programme to redistribute assets? Two recent BEE deals have thrown the issue into stark relief.One is the pending R7,5-billion Vodacom BEE deal.It has been reported that former National Prosecuting Authority boss Bulelani Ngcuka, husband of the deputy president, was sideli...

By, Reg Rumney- Jul 23 2008. The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) has supplied the money for two of the biggest disinvestments from South Africa since the apartheid era. Let's be thankful. During apartheid the big conglomerates grew fatter by swallowing the assets of departing foreigners.The first disinvestment was that of the United States and Malaysian strategic equity partners in Telkom. The...

By, Reg Rumney- Jun 26 2008.Sometimes we don't give ourselves credit for the changes we've been able to bring about. Take Barloworld, the R2,4billion BEE deal of which caps some big changes that encapsulate what has happened to corporate South Africa in the past decade or so.In the early 1990s attending results presentations of the old Barlow Rand Group conglomerate, out of which Barloworld was bo...

By, Reg Rumney- Aug 10 2008. Like the recent Sasol Inzalo BEE deal, and MTN's Asonge offering, Vodacom's R7,5-billion Yebo Yethu BEE deal offers shares at a discount to the black public. All are good deals. All are solid, major companies. Both the telecommunications companies have shown spectacular growth and Sasol has scored because of the surge in oil prices.One big difference between the Vodaco...

Reg Rumney considers the relevance of local news-media business models.   If we’re not careful, the stream of reports of the demise of traditional news media in the United States may cause a self-fulfilling crisis here. For the moment, the truth is that South African news media continues to be supported by growing advertising spend, and that advertising money still goes towards mass media. ...

Reg Rumney May 28 2010   In a back-to-the-future move, Cyril Ramaphosa’s name has been in the headlines again in connection with a black economic empowerment deal.   And its one that reverses a broad-based deal. Shanduka Resources, a subsidiary of Ramaphosa’s Shanduka Group (Pty) Ltd, is buying out tens of thousands of 'distressed' shareholders who own stakes in platinum empowerment ...

Reg Rumney  23 May 2010 We journalists tend to present a deadly rivalry between a radical Ebrahim Patel at the helm of economic planning and a conservative, neoliberal Trevor Manuel, Minister in the Presidency in the charge of national strategic planning. It’s a fight to the death between Soviet central planning and US-style free markets. Each minister has set of advisers, making for handy c...