This working paper is the fourth in a series that forms part of the project 'Southern Africa - Towards Inclusive Economic Development', a three-year partnership between UNU-WIDER and the South African government aimed at generating a better understanding of regional value chains and supporting...

Ethiopia represents an excellent case study of recent industrial policy experimentation in Africa. The country is well known for its successful promotion of the cut-flower industry through business-government co-ordination. What is less known is that at nearly the same time it was also using...

The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would become an extremely unequal society. Comparative analysis reveals that certain endowments exist in societies that experience a 'persistence of inequality'. This paper shows that the emphasis on endowments may...

The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article specifies government's stated target of halving...

This study represents the first attempt at an integrated approach to assessing the potential impacts of climate change on the national economy of South Africa via a number of (but not necessarily all) impact channels. The study focuses on outcomes by about 2050. The results show the multiple...

South Africa has a nascent biofuels industry and emerging regulatory framework, and although water scarcity limits local supply potential, that of the southern African region appears substantial. This paper describes the results and modelling approach of an assessment of potential biofuel demand...

We describe the construction of a series of mini Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) for the period 1993-2013 in current and constant prices. A key feature of these SAMs is that they are all in exactly the same format across years as well as in terms of current and constant prices. In order to...

The animal feed to poultry value chain in the southern African region has seen rapid demand growth owing to increases in urbanization. This growth has been accompanied by the increase in co-ordinated investments by large, predominantly South African, firms across the region. We examine the...

This paper focuses on the relationship between regional integration in the Southern African Development Community and national policies. Review of trade, industrial, agricultural, labour, and related policy areas, indicates that national policies can and do run counter to the regional...

This paper uses normalized constant elasticity of substitution production functions to estimate the elasticity of substitution and labour-augmenting technical change in South Africa over the period 1994-2012. We find elasticities of 0.6-0.9 and positive labour-augmenting technical change, which...