Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs)

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Browsing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (PhDs) by SDG "SDG-12: Responsible consumption and production"

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    Rail infrastructure developments and their productivity impact with special reference to institutions in five Southern African development community countries
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Dzawanda, Bernard; Ferddeke, Johanes W.; Mahonye, Nyasha
    This thesis investigates the determinants of rail infrastructure investment and its impact on productivity growth in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe for the period 1960 to 2018. The descriptive analysis of rail infrastructure data covers the period from 1939 to 2018. With the exception of South Africa, data availability limited the study analytics to start from 1960. The five Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries share a common history in terms of development, and their rail networks are interconnected. The focus of the study is on the quantity of rail infrastructure. Based on the augmented Bond, Mairesse, and Mulkay (1997) investment model, we apply the Pooled Mean Group estimator of Pesaran, Shin and Smith (1999) on novel datasets of rail infrastructure measures to estimate the drivers of rail infrastructure investment and efficiency in Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Estimation results suggest that economic, geostrategic and institutional factors drive rail infrastructure investment, efficiency and productivity growth in the four countries. GDP is found to have an insignificant impact on rail infrastructure investment. South Africa being distinctly different from the other four countries provides a different contextual setting to investigate the determinants of rail infrastructure investment and efficiency, and its impact on productivity growth. We separately apply time series analysis in the case of South Africa using the Bounds Test technique of Pesaran, Shin and Smith (2001). Estimation results suggest that GDP has a significant negative impact on rail infrastructure investment in South Africa. Government investment has a significant negative impact on rail infrastructure investment. Research results suggest that geostrategic factors have a significant positive impact on rail infrastructure investment in the four countries, and insignificant on rail infrastructure efficiency except in the case of passenger rail infrastructure investment where the impact is negative. In contrast, geostrategic factors have an insignificant impact on rail infrastructure investment in South Africa except for mixed rail infrastructure investment where the impact is negative. The impact of geostrategic factors on rail infrastructure efficiency in South Africa is found to be positive.
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    Social reproduction, labour markets, and economic change in South Africa
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Francis, David Campbell; Valodia, Imraan
    The South African rural economy, and its relationship to the industrial economic heartlands, has been the focus of study for many decades. In the 1970s, Harold Wolpe provided an incisive materialist analysis of apartheid. He argued that the rural economy served as a site of the reproduction of labour for capitalism in urban South Africa, thus ensuring a supply of cheap labour. His cheap labour thesis has formed the backbone of political economy analysis in South Africa ever since. But Wolpe, and other such as Mike Morris, who studied the relationship between the rural economy and the development of capitalism in South Africa, were largely unconcerned with the highly gendered nature of cheap labour, despite the fact that women were actively excluded from mining and the industrial economy by law, and played a critical role in the reproduction of life and labour in the Bantustans. Following the end of apartheid, the legal barriers preventing women from working in the main economy were dismantled, and women’s labour force participation rose rapidly. But this legal equality has not translated into substantive equality: women in rural areas continue to be significantly worse off economically than men. Unemployment rates are significantly higher for women, and they earn lower wages than men, even where they do the same work. Women continue to undertake far more unpaid work than men, and girl and women-headed households are more likely to live in poverty. Furthermore, despite well-developed literature on South Africa’s political economy, we know little about the productive and reproductive lives of rural women in contemporary South Africa. This thesis critically re-examines Wolpe for the 21st century by providing a materialist, gendered analysis of the economy of Agincourt, Mpumalanga, an area which remains on South Africa’s geographic and economic periphery. It shows how households in this part of rural South Africa are responding to the ways in which capitalism in South Africa has changed in the post-apartheid period. This thesis illuminates the important links between labour force participation, paid work, unpaid work, and livelihood strategies among households in the Agincourt area. It argues that focusing on the role of South Africa’s rural areas as sites of the reproduction of labour, as per the cheap labour thesis, ignores the highly gendered nature of social reproduction and its contribution to the reproduction of both labour and life. This thesis further contends that the role of South Africa’s rural areas cannot be investigated or theorised without a specifically gendered approach which includes women’s work in the analysis. It adds to our knowledge about an area of South Africa which is important in its own right. And Agincourt is also emblematic of the conceptual and methodological challenges of studying rural areas and their relationship with the economic 8 heartlands of urban South Africa in a way that does not marginalise the economic lives of women. It further contributes methodologically and epistemologically to studying the intersection of paid and unpaid work. It draws on a mixed-methods approach – a household survey of 600 households and 24 in-depth interviews – to investigate women’s economic lives in this marginalised place, and to re-examine the relationship between South Africa’s economic core and its periphery from an explicitly gendered perspectiv