The economist who thinks AI could double South Africa’s growth rate
AI could add as much as two percentage points to South Africa’s annual economic growth rate, on top of whatever the economy would otherwise manage,…
The Full Story
AI could add as much as two percentage points to South Africa’s annual economic growth rate, on top of whatever the economy would otherwise manage, according to Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt – an estimate that towers over what either the World Bank or PwC have put on the table.
“AI can easily add 2% to GDP growth,” Roodt has told TechCentral, responding to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2026, which calls AI a lifeline for developing economies and finds that they have more to gain – and less to fear – from AI than richer ones, because far fewer of their jobs are exposed to automation. That is a claim about the balance of risk and reward, not about the size of the prize: the bank’s own modelling still puts the productivity dividend to emerging markets at well under half that of advanced economies.
Asked whether he meant the annual growth rate or a one-off lift to the level of output, Roodt confirmed the former: whatever growth turns out to be, AI can add 2% on top of it, each year. The lower end of his range, 1%, is what he expects as things stand; the 2% assumes the skills and policy constraints are dealt with.
“Current GDP growth is less than 1%, for most of the past 15 years,” Roodt said. Population growth of about 1.4% on his estimate means “we are getting poorer on a per capita basis” and that “most GDP growth comes from population growth”.
Stats SA’s latest mid-year estimates put population growth lower, at 1.2%, but his broader point holds: the economy grew 1.1% in 2025, just short of the rate at which the population expanded.
Growth picked up to 1.9% year on year in the first quarter of 2026. Roodt reads the longer-run shortfall as a productivity failure: “Under normal circumstances, productivity growth should add approximately 1%, which means our productivity growth is dismal.”
PwC’s modelling, published in its South Africa Economic Outlook in October last year, makes a very different finding. Under what it calls a tense transition – “probably the most realistic future scenario”, in which regionalisation and nationalism fragment the technology landscape – South Africa sees “a small annual gain in real GDP and an aggregate benefit of 1.2 percentage points over the 10-year period” to 2035.
That is cumulative, not annual, and PwC is explicit about the difference. Globally it puts the upside at up to 15 percentage points of output over the decade, which “would effectively add one percentage point to annual real GDP growth rates”. On the same basis, 1.2 points over 10 years works out to roughly a tenth of a point a year – making Roodt’s estimate more than 15 times PwC’s most realistic local scenario, and about two-and-a-half times the World Bank’s most optimistic figure for emerging markets.
The gap narrows if both sides are read as conditional. PwC’s better outcome, if South Africa “can reduce inequality of access to AI tools”, is six percentage points towards 2035 – still cumulative, or about 0.6 of a point…