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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including violence of labour systems in South Africa, economic insecurity, and South Africa's history of extreme inequality.

An introduction is presented to the issue of the journal that discusses topics such as market economics in the developing world, the role of stock exchanges in emerging economies, and economic conditions in South Africa.

Until recently, the deepening of financial markets in developing countries has been widely seen as growth-enhancing. A well-developed capital market – so the argument goes – provides a source of finance for productive investment, thus fostering growth. South Africa possesses one of the oldest stock exchanges among emerging economies, making the country a good case study to scrutinise such growth-enhancing effects. Employing a detailed – and original – analysis of company annual reports and financial statements, this article questions the validity of the growth-enhancing claims made for financial deepening. Although the South African equity market is a source of substantial funds for mining companies, the consequences of their activity do not appear to enhance growth but rather to induce financial fragility. New evidence will show that listed mining companies use financial markets to support their speculation in mining assets. As a consequence, financial funds are channelled into few productive activities with limited impact on job creation. Crucially, detrimental effects on monetary policy and domestic credit growth can be expected, since external finance is not flowing towards productive investment but ends up as cash holdings on corporate balance sheets. This trend in turn encourages rapid credit expansion, which recently favoured unsustainable consumption-driven growth in South Africa,1 leaving the country with heavy job losses and high household debt in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite an ambitious land reform programme, many rural households in South Africa derive only a small proportion of their livelihoods from agriculture, and tend rather to rely on off-farm incomes, whether in the form of wages from the commercial sector or social grants provided by the government. Focusing on communal areas in Thaba Nchu in the eastern Free State, this article addresses both continuities and transformations of the local land use patterns between the early twentieth century and the current state of low agricultural production. Based on ethnographic, archival, and aerial photographic data, the study retraces critical changes in the social–ecological system, taking into particular consideration the effects of governmental interventions on the agro-economic sector. Although rural Thaba Nchu has undergone profound shifts of land use patterns in its history, agricultural production there was most significantly transformed by the ‘betterment schemes’ initiated by the apartheid government. Initially intended to rehabilitate the reserves, the betterment in fact undermined local agriculture and destroyed rural livelihoods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Partnerships have recently gained increasing popularity in the development community and are thought to play a key role in facilitating market access for smallholder farmers. This is particularly evident in South Africa, where strategic partnerships between emerging farmers and agribusinesses have become important instruments by which the government may promote the transition of ‘emerging farmers’ into independent commercial farmers able to participate in global markets. This article studies six partnerships in the South African citrus sector to analyse to what extent they enhance the ‘commercialisation’ of emerging farmers. An ‘innovation system’ perspective is applied to understand how far partnerships actually challenge and change the status of emerging farmers. Our results indicate that partnerships succeed in increasing market access. A closer look at the partnership processes, however, reveals the conditions under which success is achieved and that partnerships may be less instrumental in helping emerging farmers become independent entrepreneurs. Thus, a partnership model characterised by export orientation and knowledge transfer from agribusinesses to emerging farmers is limited in its transformative potential, calling for policy-makers to move beyond a pragmatic approach to partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Madeiran immigration into South Africa from the beginning of the1900s to the 1970s followed a classic male-led migration pattern. It was virtually unheard of for a woman to migrate without a formal attachment to a man. The history of Madeiran migration has therefore usually under-stated the experience of women in the migration chain. This article attempts not only to recover some of the historical experience of women immigrants from Madeira to South Africa but to place gender relationships at the centre of the migration process. Initially they provided the labour and domestic continuity that made the release of young men from the peasant economy possible. After joining men in South Africa, they continued to provide crucial labour, stabilised the community, and became the most important bearers of cultural identity. The first section of the article focuses on male departure. It analyses the conditions in the Madeiran household which made migration both possible and desirable. The second section discusses the migration of women to South Africa through various forms of marriage and family reunification. The final section concentrates on the immigrant family. It examines patriarchal households, the isolation of women, the influence of the Catholic Church and the often unrecognised role of women's labour in establishing family businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Casual labour practices are one of the defining characteristics of developing urban labour markets. Whenever non-governmental organisations (NGOs), businesses or the state apparatus institutionalise the use of casual labour, politics are involved. Based on a case study from Cape Town, South Africa, this article explores this politics of labour at the community level. A main focus is on the implications of casual labour practices for local civil society politics and forms of representation, by examining how different actors engage politically in the labour practices of municipal services and a large-scale housing project. Our analysis reveals how formal requirements for using local labour are interpreted in community terms as territorialised notions of entitlements and rights, leading to a simultaneous shift towards fragmentation and territorialisation of interests where local community groups facilitate employment casualisation ‘from below’. These processes also create new insider–outsider dynamics which threaten to fragment historical forms of class-based solidarity as community actors compete over access to limited resources; they also challenge broader aims of integration in an urban landscape deeply divided by class and race. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article introduces reports published in the issue of the journal such as one by Kees van der Waal and Steven Robins on the Afrikaans song "De la Rey," another by Jonathan Crush and Bruce Frayne on food security in South Africa, and one by Sarah Mathis on rural households.

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) announced in July 2010 its intention to introduce a new amnesty for illegal capital flight. For a flat rate fee of 10 per cent of the value of the assets, corporations and individuals disclosing their illegal expatriation of capital prior to February 2010 would receive no further penalties and be allowed to keep their assets offshore under the 'Voluntary Disclosure Programme' (VDP). SARB sees this as a first step towards the complete liberalisation of outflows. Such capital flight is not new but it has worsened significantly since the defeat of apartheid. As a percentage of GDP, it increased from an average of 5.4 per cent per year between 1980 and 1993 to 9.2 per cent between 1994 and 2000, and averaged 12 per cent between 2001 and 2007, finally peaking at a staggering 20 per cent in 2007. The vast majority of (illegal) capital flight arises out of transfer pricing by conglomerates, especially in and around mining, and forms part and parcel of a more general adjustment of such conglomerates to the imperatives of financialisation and globalisation in the wake of an apartheid backlog. In this sense, capital flight has been the most important form taken by the post-apartheid dividend, and has dictated and conformed with other less than satisfactory economic and social developments attached to the post-apartheid era, including elite Black Economic Empowerment. The impact has been to intensify falling domestic investment in productive activities, declining capital stock across almost all productive sectors, macroeconomic austerity and vulnerability, and de-industrialisation of the economy, further entrenching unemployment, poverty and extreme inequality in the provision of basic services. Rather than focusing on the motives of individuals, our approach emphasises that capital flight is a consequence of broader shifts in the global economy and the historical trajectory of South African economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas most countries in Southern Africa have experienced globalisation as externally imposed, in South Africa it has been largely internally generated by the state and the major business groups that dominate the economy. This paper examines the political economy of restructuring in South Africa, focusing particularly on the statist and capitalist logics of globalisation, and how they intersect. It explains how the South African state is trying to negotiate globalisation, and why major South African conglomerates have moved their headquarters to Britain. The impacts on employment and economic diversification of increasing globalisation from the 'outside in' are explored. As a result of the restructuring of globalisation, the South African state is increasingly characterised by 'negative autonomy' from domestic social forces and embeddedness with transnational capital, which undermine the potential for a national developmental project. South Africa's experience has important implications for globalisation theory, which can inform praxis. The article concludes by suggesting ways the political economy might be progressively restructured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two inquiries into poverty in South Africa funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the first in the late 1920s to early 1930s and the second during the 1980s. When analysed together the inquiries offer insights into the dynamic relations and tensions between this American foundation, normative science and interpretations of poverty in South Africa during the twentieth century. The paper highlights the common ground as well as the profound differences between the inquiries and the national and international, political and institutional contexts within which they were conducted. It suggests that far from being deployed with confidence and certainty, underpinning both inquiries were contextual, institutional and intellectual uncertainties which were associated with particular visions of South Africa and the United States held by the Corporation and their funding recipients. Reference is made to the strategies employed to overcome these anxieties including the shifting notions of co-operative science they sought to promote, the contrasting meanings attached to the cultural technologies employed and the complex associations which they endeavoured to encourage. In offering a more nuanced interpretation of North–South relations than many contemporary analyses, the paper examines, through these strategies, the attempts made to satisfy the objectives of both the Corporation and its funding recipients in South Africa and the tensions which emerged over the locations of knowledge and institutional control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]