A recurrent theme of the academic literature and wider public discourse is that free trade is bad for health as it promotes economic inequality and insecurity, polluting the environment and making processed foods more widely available. Such views are also widely promulgated by international...

The paper discusses some evidence, based on a review of new literature on economic history, about what is referred to as the Sen-hypothesis, that increasing human agency (of both men and women) is a key factor in economic development. It briefly discusses various dimensions of agency (or its...

To date very little has been known about the demography of European settlers in South Africa, since descriptions have only been based on Ross’s 1975 calculations of a small sample of 300 observations in the Cape Colony. In this paper we provide a broader and deeper account, using a dataset...

The needs to find ways of lifting people out of poverty and to transform the existing patterns of inequality in South Africa are high on the country’s development agenda. Much hope is often vested in education as an opportunity for children from poor households to overcome the disadvantage of...