Does South Africa have a role to play in the global economy?
Mbeki: The challenge facing everybody is to address poverty and underdevelopment. It’s not about welfare handouts but about investment, knowledge transfers, all the things that enable economies to grow faster and modernize. Just 1% of the portfolio holdings of the institutional investors of the G7 countries amounts to two-thirds of the total Latin American economy. That gives you a measure of the volume of capital available. The challenge in my view is to find ways to channel larger volumes of that capital into direct investment … And it is in the interests of the major companies in developed countries to address the issue of poverty among billions of people who can’t afford to buy their products. How do we manage this larger transfer of these productive resources into the underdeveloped world? TIME: Why aren’t more outsiders investing in South Africa? Mbeki: We’ve attracted many high quality investments. Car companies, for instance, see us as an important base not just for the domes
