Bitcoin Around the World: South Africa

LONON (InsideBitcoins) – South Africa may not be a country that immediately springs to mind when one starts to mull over the regional potential of bitcoin. It’s one of those countries that doesn’t quite fit into any of the more familiar pigeonholes; an emerging economy that ranks 30th in terms of PPP adjusted GDP, it’s much lower per capita ranking of 67 might seem to the uninitiated, baffling. One of the downsides of even a passing interest in cryptocurrencies rests in the multidisciplinary approach one has to take in forming a rational framework of understanding. Riding high on the list of ‘need to know’ items is a passing understanding of economics.
Take the Gini coefficient for example; whilst not quite as frightening as it sounds it’s one of those indicators that has more to do with bitcoin than you might think. Simply put, it’s a measure of wealth distribution or rather the inequality of said distribution. A rating of 100 would mean that all of the wealth of a country was owned by a single person, and nobody else would have so much as two beans to rub together. Such a rating has, thankfully, never existed, but South Africa’s rating of 65.0 is absurdly high. It remains the second most unequal society on the planet with the neighboring country of Namibia taking the top spot.
With so much wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, the much touted rising economy of South Africa becomes a meaningless badge of distinction to the vast majority of the country’s 54 million inhabitants. A quarter of all South Africans are living on less than $1.25 a day and with such low income comes the predictable mix of disadvantages: no access to credit, no access to financial services, no pensions, and so on; the list is depressing, the subaltern of South Africa would no doubt agree.

This post was published at Inside Bitcoins on Mar 9, 2015.