Mboweni's plan, quietly released late on Tuesday on National Treasury's website, calls for structural reforms that can "reverse the downward trend in South Africa’s growth potential and competitiveness". 

These include prioritising labour intensive growth, promoting export competitiveness, implementing flexible industrial and trade policy, encouraging small business growth and modernising network industries.

DA finance spokesman Geordin Hill-Lewis said Mboweni's proposed reforms were "pro-growth and pro-jobs" and were sure to be opposed by the left wing of the ruling African National Congress, but the minister should stand firm. 

"The opponents of inclusive market-based policies in the ANC will now work to smother this reform. The minister must not be intimidated by the enemies of growth in his own party. Now is the time to stare down the radical forces destroying the country’s prosperity, and he will have our support in doing so," he said.

"The proposals are sure to be opposed and undermined at every turn by the radical left of the ANC, a faction that is bent on ever-more state control over every aspect of the economy, to facilitate looting and to protect incumbents."

National Treasury said the proposed reforms could raise exponential growth by two to three percent and create more than a million jobs.

These include labour market reforms, with Mboweni raising the impact that the extension of collective bargaining wage agreements to small businesses has on labour costs and therefore youth unemployment and calling for this to be addressed.

He also mooted product market reforms to allow new entrants to challenge existing firms and land tenure reform to unlock economic value in rural economies.

The minister noted that agriculture and the services sector had the capacity to absorb low skilled labour and therefore to address unemployment among the youth that reached 55 percent in the first quarter of the year, but added that farming needed support for new entrants, improvements in productivity and better land use. He said land reform must not be a simple question of transfer but must be done to grow the agriculture sector and by extension the economy.

"We need deliberate policy measures and interventions that can bias economic growth towards employment-intensive sectors."

He said manufacturing had far greater potential in labour productivity still but this required favourable industrial policy and better integration into regional markets to allow South Africa to benefit from the expected migration of tens of millions of manufacturing jobs from China in the next generation.

National Treasury also pointed to the renewable energy sector as a big potential job creator and said it would do as much as possible to allow this industry to flourish. It urged bold steps in restructuring the electricity sector, centred around the restructuring of Eskom and removal of barriers in the sector. These include reintroducing the Independent Systems Market Operator Bill and introducing legislation to allow households that use solar electricity sources to sell their excess units to the grid, which would save government from spending more on further electricity infrastructure expansion.

It estimated that it would realistically take ten years to implement the proposals fully.

ANA