More expats coming home
So there is a silver lining to the global credit crisis....
According to a report on Fin 24.com, the Credit crisis does in fact have a silver lining. Jeremy Gardiner, a director at Investec Asset management, commented that "loads" of South Africans are coming home and fewer emigrating, which is good news on skills and knowledge transfer.
South Africa is set to benefit from the stream of new skills and knowledge coming back into our country. As our country is currently short of skills, this is positive to combat our skills shortage and so will bring benefits into our country.
Gardiner notes that reports show emigration is down, potentially because of the far smaller job market available in Australia and the UK. For South Africa a possible area for development could be to try and encourage those skilled workers- who are jobless in foreign countries-to come and work in SA. However, in order to do so the Government would need to make process locally, in terms of visas and work permits available to highly skilled foreigners.
According to Gardiner the current theme in developed countries including the United Kingdom, is a movement toward downscaling lifestyles and cutting down costs. With many retrenchments due to economic pressures, it has become difficult for South Africans, not to mention British citizens to live over in the UK. Gardiner comments that there are waves of South Africans coming home, Australians going to Australia and Poles going back to Poland.
With our current Budget and recent drop in interest rates, a further 3% to 4% cut this year could result in far happier consumers in SA; provided they are able to keep their jobs. With this current trend, South African citizens could be looking toward having skilled individuals coming back into our country thus offering a large variety of economic support it terms of finances, personal spending and so forth.
Here at Justmoney.co.za, we strongly suggest you start to save even a small percentage of your salary each month, get rid of debt and make sure you are taking retirement planning into account to try and ensure you are one of those consumers who could benefit from the interest rate drops
The global economic crisis is widespread and even though, here in South Africa, things look far better than that in international markets, one can never be too prepared for the future. As for our expats, the potential influx of skilled people would provide SA with the much needed skills and benefits that come from educated individuals remaining in our country and giving back to society.