The dynamics of South African banking in the 1980s

Abstract

Abstract Banking in the 1980s corresponded with learning a new vocabulary, as the era of direct controls of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to more market-related methods of monetary controls. Changes in the world and South African economies precipitated profound banking changes in South Africa. Since the early 1970s the South African economy has been adversely affected by a succession of unfavourable economic and political developments, which has led to a lower than average economic growth rate, a decline in fixed investment, an increase in unemployment and a constant decline in the per capita standard of living. Though this process of economic decline was temporarily interrupted by the dramatic rise in the gold price between 1977 and 1980 and good rain, the world recession of the early 1980s soon caught up with the weakened South African economy. The structural slowdown of South Africa's rate of economic real growth began in 1974 and not in 1981. A 4,9 per cent average annual GDP growth rate between 1946 a...