Everyone benefits greatly from the fact that there is a significant number of exceptional asset managers in the world, and SA has at least its fair share.

The industry has also begun down a path of putting pressure on businesses to be more ecologically responsible – particularly regarding climate change challenges.

Indications are rapidly accumulating to suggest that the industry’s impact in this regard could be truly profound.

It therefore follows that asset managers should be able to make a significant contribution toward SA developing a powerful set of solutions to fix its economy.

Upon closer examination such logic dissolves as solving SA’s economic development challenges requires tools far different from those employed by asset managers.

Asset managers’ primary value add is that they price securities.

This requires coordinating an exceedingly complex and challenging number of tasks within an environment coping with permanent shifts amid continual flux.

Such efforts accelerate capital formation and the capacity for economies to more quickly absorb new technologies and broader forms of innovation leading to far higher economic output than what would be possible without astute asset managers.

It is hard to overemphasise the role of international norms in the field of asset management. The industry is highly globalised. Benchmarking is rife and the pressure for achieving best practices is interwoven with returns and career success.

None of these formidable attributes prepares local or overseas asset managers to tackle SA’s economic development challenges.

SA’s nearly flat long-term trajectory of per capita income traces to economic policies which are reinforced by a majority of voters being poor.

A core consequence of the rise of globalisation over the past three decades is that there are few countries beyond this region where a majority of voters are poor.

SA’s policy makers aren’t punished by voters for being dismissive of global success paths.

Whereas asset managers are very clear on their objectives and their performance is tightly benchmarked, SA’s policy makers report to politicians who have laundry lists of objectives and where horrific performance provokes minimal consequences.

The key determinant of economic development success has been shown to be good governance.

Asset managers have developed considerable expertise at encouraging good governance by company managers but if voters aren’t going to hold elected leaders accountable, asset managers can only take up so much slack.

Nor have local or international asset managers demonstrated much insight at unpacking SA’s growth impediments.

SA’s policy makers very much need the structures which are central to asset management: a clearly defined goal; benchmarking; objective analysis; and international best practices.

Yet local and international asset managers have been as vulnerable to the ANC’s obfuscation through multiple goals as voters have been. Social justice issues have, at times, been to asset managers what kyrptonite was to superman. Most particularly, the daddy of social justice issues, inequality.

As a result of massive cross border integration, inequality and poverty have plummeted globally. While inequality has risen in wealthier countries, poverty has dropped sharply in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa.

Given SA’s poverty and unemployment, it makes zero sense to focus on inequality. For starters, reducing inequality requires reducing poverty which is a far more accountable task.

Asset managers are not equipped to advocate for subjugating inequality concerns to the centrally important issue of persistent, wide-spread poverty. This is just the most pressing of many such political-economic disconnects.

The core blockage to SA’s economy is that government policies have prioritised redistribution to the point of precluding even modest per capita income growth. Policies can be reversed but redistribution is the perceived path to social harmony through political power having been transferred to the majority a quarter century ago.

SA’s poverty entrenching redistribution biases have precluded the path dozens of countries have followed to plunge poverty, surging value-added exports. Emphasising redistribution comes at the cost of competitiveness thereby closing off export channels.

SA has always lacked sufficient domestic purchasing power to rapidly alleviate poverty. The 1990s political transition needed to accept this core reality but that has yet to happen. Why have asset managers with their highly advanced understanding of economics failed to appreciate this?

SA suffers from twin surges, health and wealth, AIDS and poverty. If the world’s best surgeons had been charged with finding remedies for AIDS, they would have quickly acknowledged that their expertise is largely unrelated to the microbiological challenges.

It is easy to show in a simple model that SA’s anti-export policies combined with consumers being hooked on expensive debt will sharply retard growth. Late winter of 2014 provided a pop quiz for policy makers, asset manager and others across the financial services spectrum regarding awareness of such relationships when rescuing African Bank was publicly debated.

The collapse of the bank should have provoked a policy awakening. Yet there was near uniform support for a bailout when the correct response should have been to reduce consumer’s reliance on expensive debt. It should come as no surprise that the World Bank now sees little scope for SA to grow per capita income over the next decade.

As asset management cultures are anchored around clearly defined goals and benchmarking performance while their daily focus is on capital market metrics, such companies have made very modest contributions to SA developing workable growth model. Life is full of surprises but to expect asset managers to provide the economic development solutions SA needs is imprudent.

Some further thoughts:

Individual contributions vary but overall the asset management industry provides enormous value.

The global economy would be far smaller if not for the confidence-building insights asset managers provide to business people and consumers.

That asset managers can competently, though imperfectly, price securities encourages businesses to invest more and consumers to spend more – this powerful growth inducing leverage is complimented by the industry’s risk mitigation tools and those of regulators.

In recent years, asset managers have further added value by demanding better governance standards and most recently investors have begun to weigh in creatively, and effectively, regarding climate change and other important societal issues.

In SA today asset managers are generally passive when it comes to mitigating the nation’s foremost blockages – public policies which over indulge politically popular but economically devastating redistribution reflexes.

Such passivity in the Zuma years was understandable but the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other.

As with leaders in other industries, asset management executives should not be shy about enhancing the national dialogue to advance their industry’s interests and national well-being.

• asset managers should lever what they do best

In pursuit of enhanced risk-adjusted returns, asset managers should endorse high growth paths through evaluating, pricing and funding investments.

SA has reached a point where, in the absence of surging value-added exports, political and economic event risks will compound.

Successful emerging economies have copied the successful policies of high growth neighbours while seeking to improve on them – that this doesn’t happen in SA’s political realm is no reason for asset managers to mimic such unresponsiveness toward such key insights.

SA’s policy makers have recently recognised the need to grow exports but importing success-inducing policies is still resisted by political pressures to continue a redistribution focus.

Other countries rely on entrepreneurs to ferret out export opportunities and they provide government support for such initiatives.

SA is impeded by policies anchored around redistributing the income and wealth of the domestic economy – this sharply curtails export prospects.

Transcending SA’s politically entrenched anti-competitiveness policy biases requires a powerful vision with broad political and commercial appeal.

SA’s politicians are ill-equipped to assess the relevance of emerging global developments whereas SA’s asset managers are expert at such tasks.