'Black economic empowerment has failed': Piketty on South African inequality

In Soweto to deliver the annual Nelson Mandela lecture, the rock star economist says the country is more unequal than under apartheid. Daily Maverick reports

Thomas Piketty is puzzled. To a near-capacity crowd in Soweto, he confesses that South Africa presents him and his fellow economists with a conundrum.

"Of course now we are 25 years after the fall of apartheid " [but] inequality is not only still very high in South Africa, but has been rising and in some ways income inequality is even higher today than 20 years ago. This is something we want to better understand," he told the audience at the University of Johannesburg campus.

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