Search

Like most governments around the world, the South African government adopted a uniform, place-blind response to the coronavirus pandemic, including a hard lockdown. New evidence from a large househ...

Services are the fastest growing portion of world trade and now account for nearly a quarter of global exports. This presents opportunities for emerging economies to adapt and enter new markets. Many countries in southern Africa have struggled to diversify from a heavy reliance on primary commodities towards manufacturing industries. Tradable services could contribute to economic growth and development by bolstering industrial capabilities, facilitating productivity growth, and contributing directly to exports. The authors examine evidence on international services trade for the Southern African Development Community between 1995 and 2012, and supplement this with a review of Foreign Direct Investment from South Africa. Tradable services appear to have made a limited contribution to total trade for most countries, and there is little evidence of significant regional integration or specialization in higher value-added activities. The role of tradable services is an important policy and research agenda that warrants much more attention all round.

International audience

A new conventional wisdom, spanning academic and policy communities, sees a combination of economic competitiveness, social cohesion and responsive governance as essential for survival in the post-1980s world--and cities as crucial to achieving these goals. This interdisciplinary text provides the first critical examination of these ideas, drawing on the UK Cities research program and other recent research. It combines analysis of the competitiveness-cohesion-governance problematic with examination of the major processes underlying key sectors of the urban economy, physical development, social relations, neighborhoods and urban policy.

The main geographical unit for official unemployment rates below regional level is the Travel-to-Work Area. TTWAs sub-divide Britain into a single set of mutually exclusive areas. Each is supposed to constitute a fairly self-contained labour market, i.e. most of the workforce living and working within the same area The definition of these areas is currently based on commuting data from the 1981 Census. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is currently undertaking a review of unemployment statistics to see whether the requirements of users such as local authorities and TECs/LECs are being met. (1) One option is to update the TTWA boundaries using me 1991 Census to reflect recent changes in commuting patterns. Another option is to replace TTWAs with a reporting system based on smaller or different areas. This is a vital decision for economic researchers and policy-makers and one which is discussed in this economic perspective

Includes abstract., Includes bibliographical references., The paper investigates whether the spatial distribution of economic activity in South Africa is static or evolving. Testing Gibrat’s Law to determine this, results suggest growth patterns in South Africa have been divergent over the period 1996-2010. The share of population, employment and GVA in the largest municipalities has been increasing relative to the shares in smaller municipalities.