Links
Here we provide useful links to various article, statistics sources, teaching aids, other websites and general useful information.
MERG
During a visit to Canada in June 1990, the then ANC President, Nelson Mandela raised the issue of the 'urgent need for a better understanding of economic policy issues in South Africa within the anti-apartheid movement as it prepares for forthcoming negotiations'. Out of this the network-based Macro-Economic Research Group (MERG) was established in order to 'stimulate and co-ordinate policy research and training in the identified priority areas' and develop a 'macro-economic policy framework' within whose terms and parameters various policy options could be tested and economic policymaking take place. Leading local and international economics contributed to the project. MERG’s macroeconomic policy framework was launched to the democratic movement at a formal media launch on 3 December 1993. Unfortunately it was met with hostility by various ANC leaders who by that time had been strongly influenced by orthodox economic policy advice during transitional negotiations.
Published Articles
Andrew Bowman and Gilad Isaacs (2014) CSID / CRESC Working Paper and RMF Occassional Paper
Public debate during the 2014 AMCU-led platinum miners' strike was hampered by the foregrounding of certain sets of financial data at the expense of others. This paper attempts to broaden the terms of the debate. Firstly, it situates the current financial predicament of South Africa’s three largest platinum mining companies within the context of high profits achieved in the 2000s commodities’ boom. Secondly, it provides an overview of the financial implications of the wage offers and demands made by the parties sitting on opposite ends of the negotiating table.
Ben Fine and Sam Ashman (2013) Transformation 81/82
This article focuses on the role played by both national and global finance in comparative economic performance.
Ben Fine and Sam Ashman (2013) Global Labour Column
The mining core of South Africa’s economy saw, in 2012, the most explosive and significant strike wave since the defeat ofapartheid. At Marikana, it involved the killing of 34 Lonmin strikers allegedly by police on 16th August. These events, and the response to them by the Tripartite Alliance of the African National Congress (ANC), Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), starkly reveal the economic and social issues in South Africa today, highlighting how many features of the apartheid system havebeen reproduced and even intensified.
Ben Fine (2012) Transformations 78
An analysis of the National Development Plans from the theoretical viewpoint of 2030.
Ben Fine (2012) Review of African Political Economy 39:134
The New Growth Path (NGP) is the symbolic policy document of South Africa’s newly formed Department of Economic Development. It marks an intended break with the growth path of the first two decades of the post-apartheid era. But does it do so in principle and is it likely to do so in practice?
Sam Ashman, Ben Fine and Susan Newman (2011) Journal of Southern African Studies 37: 1
The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) announced in July 2010 its intention to introduce a new amnesty for illegal capital flight. 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.
Sam Ashman, Ben Fine and Susan Newman (2011) Socialist Register
South Africa is now, ‘officially’, the most unequal society in the world – though there seems to be a macabre rivalry with Brazil for this status. How are we to situate these and other developments within a broader analysis of the political economy of South Africa since the defeat of apartheid? We argue that it is necessary to examine the specific form that neoliberalism and financialization have taken in the region, and how wider changes in the
world economy and capitalist development have interacted with the legacy of the apartheid past.
Imraan Valodia, Ben Fine, Richard Hausmann, Matt Andrews (2009) Transformations 69
Organisations of Interest
The International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE) was founded in 2006 with the aim of promoting political economy in and of itself but also through critical and constructive engagement with mainstream economics, heterodox alternatives, interdisciplinarity, and activism understood broadly as ranging across formulating progressive policy through to support for progressive movements. The Minerals Energy Complex and Comparative Industrialisation Working Group takes as its point of departure the conceptualisation of the minerals-energy complex (MEC) developed by Fine & Rustomjee and presented most fully in their seminal 1996 study of The Political Economy of South Africa as way of understanding capital accumulation in South Africa. Whilst this working group has its origins in work on the South African economy, and this will remain an important element, it will focus on the broader theoretical, historical and contemporary debates around industrial accumulation, and the associated roles of classes and the state.