This paper investigates whether teacher strikes affect student achievement at the primary school level in South Africa. A cross-subject analysis with student fixed effects is used to eliminate sources of endogeneity bias at the school and student level. Results indicate that teacher strike...

In this report, we review what we know about learning losses and other schooling impacts in South Africa after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 and 2021). Four overall trends emerge from existing evidence. First, there have been extensive learning losses in the General Education and...

This paper describes a rigorous data collection process to find and verify the quality of what could potentially be high-functioning or high-performing schools accessible to the poor in three of South Africa’s nine provinces. A potential sample of ‘outlier’ schools is selected using...

This dissertation considers two factors that are considered critical to disrupting an existing culture of inefficiency in the production of learning in South Africa, namely school leadership and teachers’ unions.This first part of the dissertation positions itself within a growing discourse in...

There are significant lifelong impacts of quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) interventions on children’s health, development, education and future life prospects, but the costs of these services are often cited as a barrier to attending ECCE programmes. With limited state...

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, and the anticipated socio-economic impacts of a hard lockdown, the South African government has leveraged three channels of social protection to protect livelihoods: social insurance, a social assistance programme of grants and localised social relief efforts....

This paper explores the reasons for the unbalanced growth structure of South Africa. While a number of emerging markets show a high proportion of value added and employment being generated by the service sector, South Africa is one of very few such economies that also show a strong decline in...

Rather than a rigid racial ideology, it is argued that South African apartheid was a pragmatic response of a white oligarchy to changing economic and political constraints. Consequently, the degree to which apartheid principles were applied and enforced by the South African state varied over...

The stylized view of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress in the first 143 years of Dutch rule. New evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records show that previous estimates about wealth at the Cape are inaccurate. In contrast to...