Salient to Investors:
South Africa’s mine violence is the worst since the end of apartheid in 1994 caused by one of the world’s biggest wealth gaps – worse than Honduras and the Central African Republic.
60 percent of black South Africans live in poverty and 28 percent are jobless.
Professor Dirk Kotze at the University of South Africa said there is a high explosive potential. much more emotional than a labor dispute.
White South Africans, 9 percent of the population, earn on average 8 times more than blacks.
Citigroup estimated in 2010 that South Africa had the world’s richest mineral deposits worth $3.5 trillion.
The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, was 0.63 in South Africa in 2009, the highest of 25 developing nations – zero means society is totally equal, 1 means the society is completely unequal.
Peter Attard Montalto at Nomura said black income really hasn’t changed.
Razia Khan, an economist at Standard Chartered said that social instability is already serious enough to impact the economy.
Read the full article at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-03/south-africa-mine-deaths-show-wealth-gap-inciting-tension.html