Were it not for the relative good performance of South Africa’s private sector, the slippage by 14 places on the WEF’s World Competitiveness Index would have been much much worse. And there is strong evidence that Jacob Zuma, Malusi Gigaba and Mosebenzi Zwane each pulled their weight in efforts to contribute to lower rankings on some of the indicators… Continue reading “Zuma, Gigaba & Zwane contribute to SA’s slippage on WEF’s Competitiveness Index… in “favouritism in public decisions” SA ranks amongst the worst”
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Brand South Africa’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Kingsley Makhubela is wrong: SA’s decline in the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Index cannot be ascribed to low GDP growth. Makhubela is confusing outcome with cause. Continue reading “South Africa: from Flavour of the Month to a Bad Taste in the Mouth…”
Do the regularities in enterprise dynamics observed for South African towns and municipalities also occur elsewhere? The U.S. Census Bureau has publicly available data records that allow a quick examination of this question. The data records of counties in the USA, entities for which a range of different measures are available, were downloaded. These included the number of establishments and the number of employees per establishment. The first ten counties of the first State in the data record, i.e. Alabama, were used for a quick comparison. Continue reading “Enterprise regularities are probably universal”
it would help more to combat crime effectively
Is the blind leading the blind when it comes to the promotion of black businesses? This question in my previous blog apparently ruffled a few feathers. Let us therefore compare the positive impact of Government strategies to stimulate business formation and the negative impact on business formation by Government’s failures in core governmental functions. Continue reading “Government’s attempts to promote business formation as effective as a rain dance…”
Government is pursuing numerous strategies to promote black owned businesses, e.g.:
- The 80 Black Industrialists’ programme;
- The Gazelles Programme (fast growing small enterprises that should increase their turnover and growth much faster than the market average);
- The Cooperative Incentive Scheme;
- Preferential procurement programmes;
- BBBEE-measures effectively forcing large and medium-sized companies to subcontract to black owned businesses;
- Sector Charters;
- Grants and SEFA loans;
- Land Reform and Restitution;
- The Free State Provincial Grants Scheme and numerous other provincial initiatives,
and the list goes on and on… Continue reading “Is the promotion of Black Businesses done by the blind?”
An important question has exercised the minds of many economist over time: why are there differences in the sizes of different towns? For instance, why are all towns in a region not of equal size? The answer has to do with power laws.
There is no Hobbesian significance in the word ‘power’ – it is just a mathematical term. If the value of some quantity q depends on the value of another quantity x according to a power-law relationship, this means that each time x is doubled, y increases by some constant factor (Ball, 2005).
EOSA 