Large towns

Anti-business, Central planning, Cities, Developmental state, Differentiated products, Economic freedom, ECONOMIC GROWTH/ANTI-GROWTH FACTORS, Emigration/Immigration, Enterprise density, Enterprise friendly environment, Enterprise regularities, Enterprise richness, Entrepreneurial space, Export-led growth, Free State, Immigration/Emigration, KwaZulu-Natal, Large towns, Municipal efficiency, Population size, Predictive capabilities, Spontaneous order, State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), Trading services, Urban economy and growth

The City of Surreal Ramaphosa on the banks of the Rubicon

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

Cyril Ramaphosa’s vision of “a first post-apartheid city with skyscrapers, schools, universities and factories” (if implemented) has all the potential of becoming a disastrous social engineering experiment wasting resources on a massive scale. Not because the idea of a new city is wrong per se, but simply because the president is ideologically wedded to state-led development, holding a very negative view of the role of the private sector.

Ramaphosa doesn’t consider the private sector as efficient or more effective than the public sector, despite the fact that State-owned enterprises are mismanaged, bankrupt and a drag on economic development with Denel and the SABC even struggling to meet salary commitments.

Peas of the same pod

The creation of such a city is, in the Ramaphosa framework, not a vision of dynamic economic growth, but an ideological blinkered perspective of how government can improve society. Ramaphosa and all the social engineers within the ANC are, in that sense, not far from the approach of Hendrik Verwoerd. The National Party was, just like the ANC, a force pursuing transformation through prescription and limitation of choices.

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CITIES, TOWNS AND SETTLEMENTS, Demographic-entrepreneurial relationships, Enterprise regularities, Enterprise research, data and statistics, Free State, Large towns, Medium sized towns, Orderliness, Population size, Small towns

Zipf’s law and South African towns

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).

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CITIES, TOWNS AND SETTLEMENTS, Enterprise richness, Entrepreneurial activity, Large towns, Medium sized towns, Small towns

Of enterprise richness in South African towns

In two recent publications in the South African Journal of Science, we explored the enterprise richness, defined as the number of different enterprise types, of South African towns:

Enterprise richness as an important characteristic of South African towns; and
The enduring and spatial nature of the enterprise richness of South African towns

Remarkable and enduring regularities were observed between the number of enterprise types and the total number of enterprises in towns.

Log-log relationships which endured over 70 years were recorded and these relationships raise important issues about the nature of entrepreneurship and its dynamics in different-sized South African towns. The figure shows such a relationship that covers a range of villages with fewer than 10 enterprises to towns with 350 enterprises.

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