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Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: ‘merit’ versus ‘affirmative action’, beneficiaries of change, pace of transformation and so on. This conflict reflects the broader tensions over how South African society should be restructured. Change in racial composition at the level of leadership, coaching and players since 1990 has failed to transform cricket into a ‘people's game’. The cricket establishment is following the lead of government in prioritizing the empowerment of a minority. Class privilege has replaced race privilege. At the same time, tensions generated by change are producing further hostility along the fault lines of rac...

This paper provides a selected historical overview of inflation perception surveys undertaken in South Africa between 2006 and 2010 with a view to assessing the nature of the link between inflation perceptions and inflation expectations in the latest 2012 survey. These surveys are undertaken to assess the perceptions of respondents on the degree in which historic inflation figures reflect perceptions of actual inflation, and to find some link to inflation expectations. All the earlier pilot studies on inflation perceptions and the representative samples undertaken between 2006 and 2010 (in total six pilot studies, three representative samples and one survey among central bank employees) failed to show any link between inflation perceptions and inflation expectations. These findings cast some doubt on the premise that a policy of inflation targeting anchors inflation expectations in the current rate of inflation and therefore in the announced inflation target policy rate. In response to the earlier survey results, the question on inflation perceptions was put in different ways to respondents in the most-recent (2012) inflation perception survey to retest the hypothesis that inflation perceptions and inflation expectations are linked. The findings of this survey are analysed in this paper. These findings show a possible link to inflation expectations, and will be the subject of further research. The conclusion on the assessment of inflation perceptions is that the question matters. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p126

We consider here what has happened to one segment of South African capital since the demise of apartheid, of the Indian businessmen of KwaZulu Natal,1 and especially of its principal port city, Durban. During the long nightmare of apartheid, South Africa's Indians, a small minority constituting only three percent of the national population, suffered many restrictions on their development. Indians originally came to Natal a century and a half ago. Although they were victimised as non-whites for almost all of their time in South Africa (if not on the same terms as indigenous Africans), they nonetheless managed to build up a thriving commerce within the limits of the inward-looking apartheid economy. Our investigation of some leading Indian businesses in the post-apartheid period shows how Indians have responded to this dramatically new situation, as well as to the changing conditions of a world economy entering a major restructuring phase. Our case study has its origin in the unique confluence of two streams of migrants from Europe and Asia, whose movement defined the formation of the modern world economy. Over a century ago, poor whites and Indian labourers, along with some British and Indian merchants, came in roughly equal numbers to live together in Natal. The discriminatory measures subsequently taken in Natal foreshadowed the racial segregation of the late twentieth-century apartheid regime. In a change almost as impressive in its way as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the apartheid system in South Africa has recently been replaced by a democratic government dedicated to serving the interests of the black majority. The barriers separating rich and poor, black, brown, and white, have come tumbling down, at least in theory. South Africa's strategy for navigating this abrupt transition carries global implications. Divisions of wealth, race, age, and gender are juxtaposed at close quarters here: the social insulation of geographical distance, which might otherwise permit indifference to global inequality, does not exist.

South Africa's leading anti-apartheid organization, the African National Congress (ANC) entered the period of transition in the early 1990s with only an impressionist economic vision. But for all its limitations it was a (state-led) program of development directed at alleviating the legacy of poverty and inequality. The ANC was forced to begin to fashion a set of modeled economic proposals around which it could at some level “negotiate” with other organizations and social groups and contest an election. As in the case of the negotiations around a post-apartheid constitution, the economic program ultimately adopted differed significantly from the organization's original vision. The new economic program was a fairly orthodox neoliberal one. The shift in economic policy, we would contend, was the result of the ANC's perception of the balance of economic and political power at both the global and local level. This article critically examines these political and economic interactions in the South Africa of the 1990s; attempts to explain the reasons underlying the shift in economic policy; and ends with some reflections on the ways in which the South African experience in economic policy reform either elaborates or revises existing theories of transitional societies.

Drawing on South African experiences, this paper provides a critical evaluation of the World Bank's 1997 World Development Report, ‘The State in a Changing World’. The paper sets out the Bank's conception of a ‘good’ state as it emerges from the Report. We then evaluate this conception of the state in the context of two domains of state activism, social policy and industrial policy. Consideration is then given to the Report's views on the state's relationship to politics and society. Finally we assess the Report in relation to developments in South Africa in three areas: the state in a changing global environment, industrial policy and social policy. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article examines the relationship between progressive academic economists and anti‐apartheid social movements in the period that has come to be known as South Africa's decade of liberation, roughly the mid‐1980s to the mid‐1990s. It does so through a critical examination of the interaction of progressive economists with social movements in South Africa since 1985, an interaction which occurred in the main via policy research networks and think‐tanks. The article also explores the major trends in the relationship between progressive economists and social movements over the decade of liberation and attempts to provide some tentative answers to the controversial question of why many of South Africa's progressive economists underwent a sea change in their economic thinking by the mid‐1990s. The argument is that South African academics and intellectuals (like those elsewhere) are far from independent; they are the creatures and creations of their time. Their positions depend upon their shifting circumstan...

In 1994 South Africa's first ever democratic elections gave the ANC an overwhelming majority, with Nelson Mandela as President. This article reviews developments since then. It describes the economy at the beginning of the transition from apartheid, the policy initiatives of the new government, and the development of the economy over the three years following the 1994 elections. It analyses critically the government's 1996 'Growth, Employment and Redistribution' policy. It also discusses the shifts which have occurred in ANC economic thinking since 1990.

This paper reviews Christel Lane's Industry and Society in Europe, a comparative study of industrial change in Britain, Germany and France. Three areas covered by the book are discussed in a South African context: flexible specialisation theory; industrial relations; and the relationship between finance and industry. The paper assesses the relevance, and limitations, of Lane's primarily institutional approach, and argues that economic and industrial policy in South Africa needs to be grounded in a continued recognition of the importance of the country's unique national institutions and development challenges.

The recent advent of political democracy in South Africa has brought into sharp focus those macroeconomic and labour policies designed to combat unacceptably high unemployment levels, that have escalated steadily to present estimates of approximately 40 per cent of the Economically Active Population. The continuing implementation of neo-liberal orthodox policies, the authors maintain, will aggravate the problem. An alternative theoretical framework containing elements of a neo-Ricardian, post-Keynesian approach and based on research work of the Macroeconomic Research Group (MERG) is advocated. This approach focuses on State-led, demand-inducing policies, while not neglecting the supply side of the labour market in South Africa.

This article examines various aspects of South Africa's recent relations with the International Monetary Fund in the context of developments such as the December 1993 IMF Compensatory and Contingency Financing Facility (CCFF), the finalisation of the ANC's Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in March 1994, and the election of South Africa's first democratic government in April 1994.

This paper compares international and domestic inflation expectations and inflation credibility, and hypothesises about a possible link or disconnect between inflation expectations and inflation credibility among South Africans. No similar tests have previously been performed using South African data, and there is also a general lack of domestic and international literature on any such possible link or disconnect. While research shows that inflation expectations are taken into account by all countries targeting inflation, inflation credibility is very seldom considered. Although the hypothesis is confirmed in certain instances, it is refuted by a disconnect between the inflation expectations and inflation credibility of male and female respondents in South Africa, which cannot be explained by available data.

In the early years of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Natal provided an ideal environment in which Indian merchants could flourish. Under‐supplied with money and goods, with relative stability and with few bureaucratic hindrances, Indians could import both their goods, their skills and their time‐tested commercial and financial methods. Although the first wave of merchants found a niche mainly in the market for trade, credit and money‐lending within the colony's Indian community, the potential and possibilities for breaking out beyond these limits remained very much alive, if only the battles for full political rights, which the merchants fought so tenaciously, could be won. By the end of the century, however, things had begun to change. Europe had seized Africa, a new conservative attitude to commerce had set in and rivals were regarded with suspicion. Unable successfully to assert a British belongingness, Indians in Natal were caught up in the general xenophobia. Tolerance of their methods, ...

As inflation credibility in South Africa records low readings when measured in terms of inflation credibility barometers, this note aims at assessing whether actual price movements provide any grounds for low inflation credibility. It compares the price movements of similar items with the rate of inflation over a period of 32 years, i.e. from 1974 to 2006, and discusses the use of an inflation accuracy indicator to compare estimated price levels adjusted by the rate of inflation and actual price levels. Over the period of comparison no systematic over- or underreporting of changes in prices in terms of the rate of inflation could be detected and the analysis suggests that little or no basis can be found to justify low inflation credibility. Inflation credibility is more likely than not influenced by the most recent purchasing experiences of consumers. Doubts concerning the accuracy of inflation figures could nevertheless result in the general public concluding that monetary policy aiming at the achievement of an inflation target brings only the pain of high interest rates without the tangible benefits of lower inflation, thereby jeopardising the usefulness of an inflation-targeting monetary policy framework.

Au debut des annees 1990, le debat economique en Afrique du Sud opposait clairement deux options, l'une soutenue par le Parti national, d'inspiration liberale, l'autre qui emanait des economistes de l'ANC, preco nisant une orientation developpementaliste et une importante regulation du marche. Progressivement l'ANC a abandonne toute perspective radi cale, passant du projet de nationalisations a celui de privatisations, renon cant au controle de la Banque centrale et envisageant une croissance fondee non sur l'essor de la demande et de l'investissement public, mais sur l'investissement prive, en particulier etranger. Cette derniere option a pese tres lourd dans la definition du programme adopte en 1996, le GEAR, qui marque un ralliement au consensus de Washington et le renoncement a une perspective de developpement a contenu redistributif et democratique

In 1843 Natal, on the south east coast of Africa, became a British colony after a contest between Boer and British forces which had culminated in the battle of Congella. The colony was not particularly wealthy; its resources being made up primarily of wild game and cattle, the latter chiefly in the possession of the yet unsubjugated Africans of the area. The Zulu state was still intact and abutted the northern borders of the colony. One of the earliest concerns of the colonisers was to make the colony pay for itself which involved searching for minerals and increasing agricultural productivity, primarily by settling whites on the land and establishing export crops such as sugar.

(1998). South Africa, economics, and postcolonialism. Interventions: Vol. 1, Ideologies of the Postcolonial, pp. 43-44.

The main macro‐estimates of unemployment rates in South Africa clearly show both cyclical sensitivity and a secularly rising upward trend, presenting a striking similarity with the United Kingdom and other OECD countries. The rising long‐term trend in the unemployment rate is not confined to Blacks but probably applies to Whites, Coloureds and Asians also. It has been mainly due to a decline in the demand for labour caused by a falling rate of capital accumulation rather than by rising capital‐intensity. The slower rate of capital accumulation stems primarily from forces originating abroad, which have affected the world economy as a whole, though the fluctuating gold price has aggravated our problems. Policy in the spheres of international trade and monetary relations is therefore crucial and there are reasons for concern over current thinking in these areas.

This paper analyses the methodology used in assessing inflation credibility (i.e. perceptions of the accuracy of historical inflation rates) in countries targeting inflation, and compares the approaches used in New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden. The results indicate an implied inverse (or negative) relationship in all but one instance, between the direction of actual inflation and the perception of inflation among the respondents. The analysis also shows a lack of knowledge about inflation and price increases among South African respondents, which is absent from similar surveys in New Zealand and Sweden. Important research questions identified include possible links between inflation credibility and the adoption date of inflation targeting, as well as the type and range of targets used.