Developing Countries on the Cusp

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Developing Countries on the Cusp

South Africa is one of the upcoming world’s economies that can be argued to be soon in among the list of industrialized countries. Based on statistics generated by Statistics South Africa, South Africa is booming in terms of economic growth. The country has a large market in Africa whereby its export- based economy is the largest and the rapidly growing economy in the continent Africa. Since 1994 upon establishment of democracy, the country’s economy had an average growth rate of 4.5% year –on – year making it the fastest expanding economy in Africa (Lo, & Hiscock, 2014).The gross domestic product of South Africa has been growing at a rate of 3.16% annually. This has been as a result of the fact that the mining and manufacturing are growing at a very high rate. In the recent past, the two sectors of the economy have grown at double digits.The purchasing power parity(PPP) of south Africa proves it is a developing world economy; for example, in year 2011, it was estimated to be $569.5 billion; in 2012, it was $584 billion, and in year 2013, it was estimated to be $595.7 billion (Lo, & Hiscock, 2014). These are nice results for a country that is in its stages of development, and this shows that very soon, South Africa will be among the advanced industrialized countries of the world.The human development index of South Africa is showing good advances since the announcement of the country hosting world cup. Moreover, since the year 2010, the HDI of the country is increasing whereby the forecasted result for 2013 was 0.658. This shows that in least years’ time, the country would get into the range of 0.8 HDI index of the developed countries (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013).In conclusion, although South Africa is considered to be a medium developed economy, it shows a potential of growing rapidly into a fully industrialized economy. Therefore, soon, it would be in the list of advanced industrialized economies of the world.

References

Lo, V. I., & Hiscock, M. E. (2014). The Rise of the BRICS in the Global Political Economy: Changing Paradigms?. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2013). OECD environmental performance reviews.