Boom and bust, recovery and relapse It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves how we arrived at the present circumstances. The current post-crisis era of low growth was preceded by a large boom. The South African economy expanded continuously from the end of 1998 to the middle of 2008, its output increasing by almost half.
The environment for introducing structural reforms is better today than for several years. Monetary policy is extremely accommodative. Activity is recovering. And credit supply constraints are falling, allowing finance to flow quickly to the new investment opportunities that reforms create. All the conditions are therefore in place for governments in the euro area, individually and collectively, to begin addressing their long-run challenges.