South African inflation steady in May, as expected

JOHANNESBURG, June 18 (Reuters) - South Africa's headline inflation rate remained at 2.8% year on year in May, unchanged from the previous month (ZACPIY=ECI), opens new tab as expected by analysts, statistics agency data showed, opens new tab on Wednesday.
Inflation has been below the midpoint of the central bank's 3% to 6% target range since August 2024, allowing the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to cut interest rates at four of its last five policy meetings.
Last month the SARB cut its main lending rate by 25 basis points to 7.25% (ZAREPO=ECI), opens new tab.
It also lowered its inflation and economic growth forecasts for this year and next, stressing its preference for a lower inflation target.
In month-on-month terms inflation was at 0.2% in May, compared with 0.3% in April (ZACPI=ECI), opens new tab, data showed on Wednesday.

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Times

43 minutes ago

• Times

Surely there are better steps to growth than 600 million shoes

Terrible news: Britain is doomed to have a puny economic growth rate of about 1 per cent, the CBI said last week. This is just not enough and we should all be very worried about it. But — and I'm probably being a bit slow here — why? I looked up 'economic growth' in the dictionary, and it turns out to mean 'an increase in the amount of goods and services produced'. And then I looked around my house and thought: hang on. Don't we have too much stuff already? I'm a stingy git and don't buy much but, somehow, every room is packed with things I neither want nor need. The pot on my desk holds 23 pens, 22 of which I do not use. The bookshelves hold more books than I have time to count, most of which I have no recollection of reading. The cellar is packed with unused tools, the wardrobe with unworn clothes. It's not just me. There are 1.6 billion items of unworn clothing in British wardrobes, according to the charity Wrap — and despite that, we're expected to buy 61 garments each in 2025. More than 300 million pairs of shoes are sold in the UK every year, despite us having only 69 million pairs of feet. The average child has 238 toys, of which they use about 10 per cent. Between them, our 28 million households buy eight million new TVs a year. You get the point. Yes, some people still have too little: but most of us have stuff coming out of our ears. This is why you can use all those TVs you own to watch an entire genre of programmes dedicated to 'decluttering', so that in between the ads for more stuff to buy, Nick Knowles or Marie Kondo can tell you how to throw out all the stuff you've already bought. Stacey Solomon has one of these shows on the BBC; the other day she was talking to a very nice, normal family who had 87 board games, 358 plastic dolls and 106 animal ornaments. It was horrifying. The correct number of animal ornaments in any given household is zero. The economists say that the NHS will collapse and zombies will roam the land if we don't go on acquiring all these things at an ever-increasing rate and then, when our houses are full up, invite Stacey over to help us throw it all out and start again. This seems an odd and impractical arrangement. Swathes of the country are landfill as it is, and the rest is strewn with fly-tipped old fridges and repulsive mattresses. • CBI warns of triple whammy on slow economic growth What about the services bit of that definition, then? Perhaps we just need more of those? Our biggest industry in that department is financial services, and I'm not certain having twice as many adverts for banks and life insurance will make the nation better off in any meaningful sense. The rest of the sector is mainly pizza and fried chicken, and you've only got to look up and down your street to see there are too many of those. In the 1930s, hunger-related diseases were widespread in the UK. Now obesity causes 30,000 deaths a year. Seems like we're growing, even if the economy isn't. Not that we actually eat all of the food we buy. Back in Merrie England, your average peasant's hovel didn't throw out anything at all except the occasional plague-ridden corpse. Now the UK generates about 10 million tonnes of food waste annually. Earlier this year I had a bash at being a binman on a Coventry council estate. It wasn't an affluent area, but we were tipping weighty wheelie bins full of uneaten leftovers into the truck. I don't want to go back to Merrie England, or the 1930s. On balance, obesity is probably better than starvation. But somewhere along the line there must have been an ideal point between shortage and excess, between a population that staged mass hunger marches and a population that couldn't be arsed to haul its blubbery bulk off the sofa and waddle along to McDonald's, so ordered a Deliveroo instead. My guess is that we cruised blithely past that point without noticing, perhaps some time around 1991. A halcyon, elusive moment when we had enough to eat, but not too much; where we could replace things when they were worn out, but didn't buy loads more of them for the sake of it; where we could embrace useful innovations, but didn't 'upgrade' constantly just because an advert told us we should. I know, I sound like some green weirdo who wants us all to eat nothing but mung beans and get our power from burning the resultant methane-rich flatulence. I really don't. Thanks to the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we live in a world with anaesthetics, fish fingers and Netflix, and we can stay breathing to enjoy them for twice as long as we used to. I'm grateful for that. Still, I find it puzzling to be told that, to maintain this state of affairs, we need to buy ever-increasing quantities of stuff of all descriptions: clothes that won't be worn, gadgets that won't be used, dubious vitamin supplements, pointless scented candles, bloodthirsty video games. None of it seems to be making us much happier. What's the answer? No idea. It's got to lie somewhere between the 'buy, buy, buy' unfettered free market nutters and the 'scrimp, scrimp, scrimp' eco-loons who think we can live like hobbits in some pre-industrial Shire, shunning modernity and living off nothing but our own postcolonial guilt. An arrangement where we buy what we really need, and those things are made to last by people who are paid a decent wage for doing so. But it does seem to be awfully hard to organise. In the meantime, I'm not going to worry too much about the growth figures. I'm going to clear out the cellar instead.

Reuters

3 hours ago

• Reuters

UK to issue 10-year industrial strategy aimed at boosting growth

LONDON, June 22 (Reuters) - Britain is poised to publish a 10-year, multibillion-pound industrial strategy next week aimed at backing priority sectors, creating jobs and driving long-term economic growth. Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government has been working on a blueprint for the next decade as part of its wider "Plan for Change", under which it seeks to overhaul the country's skills system, support innovation, and channel fresh investment into high-growth areas. Britain has so far pledged more than 1.5 billion pounds ($2 billion) to be delivered through a series of targeted government funds to support skills development, creative industries and sport. Announcing on Sunday 275 million pounds to support the training of thousands in roles such as engineering and defence roles, business minister Jonathan Reynolds said the strategy would be "powered by investing in British people." "It will help transform our skills system to end the overreliance on foreign labour, and ensure British workers can secure good, well-paid jobs in the industries of tomorrow." Alex Veitch, director of policy at the British Chambers of Commerce, welcomed Reynolds' pledge. "The extra cash investment for training in key sectors, such as defence and engineering, has the potential to be a real springboard for growth," Veitch said. The government has previously said it would radically change its approach to defence to address threats from Russia, nuclear risks and cyber-attacks. In February, Starmer pledged the largest sustained increase in British defence spending since the end of the Cold War, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's insistence that Europe take more responsibility for its own security. The government has also pledged a 380 million-pound boost for creative industries from film to video games, and more than 900 million pounds to stage major sporting events and upgrade grassroots facilities. But business groups say high energy costs remain a serious threat to UK industry and have urged ministers to act. A June report from manufacturing association Make UK warned that without government intervention, Britain's energy-intensive sectors could face long-term decline. It called for measures such as network cost reform, targeted relief schemes and more predictable energy pricing. Finance minister Rachel Reeves acknowledged those pressures in her June 12 spending review, which set out departmental budgets and outlined more than 10 billion pounds of investment in green infrastructure and industrial decarbonisation. She said the government would support energy-efficiency upgrades and back the development of low-carbon technologies and confirmed the creation of a British Industrial Strategy Council to oversee the delivery of the government's growth plans. ($1 = 0.7435 pounds)

The Independent

4 hours ago

• The Independent

Starmer puts skills training at heart of industrial strategy plan

Sir Keir Starmer will set out his industrial strategy on Monday as he seeks to kickstart the stuttering economy and reduce the UK's reliance on foreign workers. The decade-long plan for 'national renewal' will include £275 million in skills investment to train Britons to do jobs in growth industries which might otherwise require imported labour. The strategy will include specific funding to train people for work in defence, engineering, digital and construction roles. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said the strategy 'will help transform our skills system to end the overreliance on foreign labour and ensure British workers can secure good, well-paid jobs in the industries of tomorrow and drive growth and investment right across the country'. Monday's industrial strategy will be followed later in the week by a new trade plan intended to make the UK the best-connected country in the world to do business. The Prime Minister will launch the industrial strategy hoping it will help in his mission of delivering economic growth. The economy shrank by 0.3% in April, the biggest monthly contraction in gross domestic product for a year-and-a-half, as businesses felt the impact of global uncertainty caused by Donald Trump's tariffs and domestic pressure as a result of hikes to firms' national insurance contributions. Around one-in-seven young people are not in education or employment, and the number of people taking an apprenticeship has fallen by almost a fifth between 2016/17 and 2023/24. The Government hopes the growth sectors identified in the industrial strategy will create 1.1 million new jobs by 2035. The skills package includes capital investment from a £200 million fund which will support new facilities including 'technical excellence colleges' providing specialised training for local industries. The total funding is expected to train thousands more workers by 2029 including computer programmers, IT technicians, electrical and civil engineers. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said: 'Skills rightly run right through the heart of this industrial strategy because they are key to breaking the link between background and success for young people and delivering prosperity for our country.' Stephen Phipson, the boss of manufacturers' organisation Make UK, welcomed the skills announcement. 'We look forward to working with the Government to fix the skills gap in manufacturing, which has been the sector's Achilles' heel for decades,' he said. Other elements of the plan are expected to include measures to help cut energy costs for industries which have complained they are being forced to compete with rivals overseas who face lower bills. Meanwhile some £380 million will be spent on a range of projects intended to double private investment in the creative industries. Shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith welcomed the investment in skills but said 'the Government are stepping on the accelerator and the brake at the same time' by hiking national insurance for firms and introducing extra employment rights which could increase costs. 'This inherent contradiction cannot make for a feasible or serious strategy, and will hold the Government to account for it,' he said.