Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management (ETDs)
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Item 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, NyashaThis 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.Item Effects of external debt capacity on infrastructure investment in the SADC region(University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Matla, Lindokuhle P.; Ojah, KaluThis report examines the effects of external public debt on infrastructure investment in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, and particularly assesses member countries’ borrowing capacity against the SADC Convergence Target. A multiple regression analysis is conducted on a panel data of 2004-2019 to examine the cross-country dynamics of the 16 SADC countries. The surprising research findings indicate an insignificant relationship between infrastructure investment and external public debt in the SADC region. Furthermore, macroeconomic variables such as Official Development Assistance, Political Stability, Gross National Savings, Gross Government Debt, and Consumer Price Index, individually have a significant and positive association with infrastructure investment. The findings of this research suggest that although government debt is theoretically expected to be an important factor in determining infrastructure investment, other factors appear to be more statistically significant in influencing infrastructure investment.