SOUTH Africa’s government is concerned about the impact that power outages had on the economy in the second quarter, as the nation’s statistics agency prepares to release data for the three-month period.
“I am worried about tomorrow’s stats,” Minister in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele told reporters Monday at the start of a cabinet strategic-planning meeting in Pretoria, the capital.
“There has been huge load-shedding and we don’t know how it has impacted the economy,” he said, using the local term for scheduled blackouts.
Statistics South Africa will publish second-quarter gross domestic product data at 11:30 on Tuesday. The economy is forecast to have shrunk 0.8% in the second quarter, according to the median estimate of 12 economists in a Bloomberg survey.
State power utility Eskom implemented electricity outages for more than half of the days in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg calculations, adding to the record blackouts in the financial year
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