While sharing some characteristics with other middle-income countries, South Africa is a country with a unique economic history and distinctive economic features. It is a regional economic powerhouse that plays a significant role, not only in southern Africa and in the continent, but also as a...

Taking South Africa as an important case study of the challenges of structural transformation, the book offers a new micro-meso level framework and evidence linking country-specific and global dynamics of change, with a focus on the current challenges and opportunities faced by middle-income...

This paper identifies the determinants of industrialization in 18 African countries, 1965 to 2018, using various estimators and applying a battery of robustness checks. Industrialization in Africa is driven by historical legacies such as colonialism; geographical factors such as rainfall and...

Deindustrialisation is typically conceptualised as a decline in manufacturing as a share of total employment. From a Kaldorian perspective deindustrialisation could have negative implications for long-run growth, given the special growth-pulling properties of manufacturing. However, defining...

Manufacturing has traditionally been regarded in the development literature as having special ?growth-pulling? or ?growth-enhancing? properties. The share of manufacturing in GDP has been declining slightly over time in South Africa, while that of services has been growing. This study focuses on...

This article empirically analyses the state of inequality in South Africa. International comparisons show South Africa to be among the most unequal countries in the world. The levels of income inequality and earnings inequality are analysed with a range of measures and methods. The results...

Unemployment and earnings inequality have moved together remarkably closely in South Africa in recent years. This article explores the relationship between unemployment and earnings inequality in South Africa, investigating the extent to which changes in unemployment can account for changes in...

The South African government has set a target of halving poverty by 2014. Using microdata from the 2005/6 Income and Expenditure Survey, this article frames government’s stated target of halving poverty by 2014 in terms of specific measures of the poverty gap and poverty headcount ratio....