South Africa’s financial markets are said to be the deepest and most sophisticated in the world. A short walk from Sandton, Africa’s richest square mile, and you are met with something else that South Africa is a world winner at – inequality. The Economy on Your Doorstep probes the reasons why this tragic paradox of South African life continues to reproduce unequal opportunity and outcomes. By tracing its history from the discovery of gold, to the commercial interests of the robber-barons who gained great wealth from South Africa’s minerals, to the black agricultural sector that survives, within an inch of vitality, on the margins of a food-secure but hungry country.

This book answers why the lasting overhang of the market fundamentalism of the 20th century has created a value system that makes many overwhelmingly rich, and others dirt poor, and the unavoidable cynicism that leads many to die ‘because of being a blanket too short, or a glass of water too far’ from the better promised life. It goes through, and beyond the graphs, margin calls, trading updates, indices and earnings reports, to explain how economic ‘actions’ frame the lives of South Africans in a transitional society faced with the challenges of unemployment, poverty and inequality.

Written in well-researched prose by Ayabonga Cawe, a development economist, columnist and broadcaster, The Economy on Your Doorstep makes sense of the post-apartheid political economy through the lives of the many people who live and survive from it everyday. It is a political economy, as the author suggests, that is defined by continuities and change, all of which are influenced by the vortex of power relationships that determine who lives where, produces what, that is sold by whom, to whom, and why.