The 2015 Statistics South Africa report on tourism1 concentrates on information about travellers, e.g. their numbers and origins, but does not provide any information about tourism and hospitality (T&H) enterprises in South Africa, e.g. their numbers or locations. Neither do the 2015/16 Annual Report of the Department of Tourism2 and the 2016 Report of the World Tourism Organization3 provide such information. Something is lacking in the tourism scene of South Africa.
Category: ENTERPRISE SECTORS
The Red Queen said to Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” 1 This advice also seems to hold for the cigarettes and whisky conundrum of South African communities.
Continue reading “The ‘cigarettes and whisky conundrum’ and the advice of the Red Queen”
Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1
500 Years after Martin Luther hammered his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenburg, Davide Cantoni, Jeremiah Dittmar and Noam Yuchtman saved their theses to the internet: Beliefs have economic consequences.
Old news, one might say, recalling Weber. But Weber’s thesis was always contested: assumptions of cultural traits based on unreliable statistics from the 19th C. Cantoni, Dittmar and Yuchtman (further-on Cantoni and co.) offer hard micro-statistical evidence from the century when Luther protested against Papal authority : 1517 was a watershed year in how people viewed the world and those (world)views had economic consequences.
In a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper of October 2017 they state: “the pre-Reformation era can be understood as an equilibrium in which a monopolist religious producer (the Catholic Church) provided political legitimacy to secular authorities at a high price—charged in the form of control over resources, tax exemptions, and some degree of political power. The Reformation represented a competitive shock in the market for salvation. Protestant reformers offered a popular, lower-cost alternative to the Catholic Church… This had implications for the allocation of resources between secular and religious uses…”
Continue reading “The economic consequences of Luther: Ideas have legs, but some come with leg-irons”When Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma announced her Manifesto for Change, she reminded me somewhat of the stern Mother Abbess singing “Climb every Mountain” for Maria (Julie Andrews) in The Sound of Music.
Definitely not her voice, but her words… Dlamini-Zuma summoned support for Radical Economic Transformation (RET): “We must know which hills to tackle next. …(t)hese are the mountain of economic transformation, the highland of land redistribution and the summit that must see us educating and skilling our people. If not, the negatives will swallow the gains we have made.”
Marvellous libretto…
With Moody’s soon to announce their assessment of SA’s credit risk, Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba made it clear that a white minority was controlling the economy through a monopoly and that was now to change. Gigaba, speaking mostly in isiZulu, said “The economy is controlled by a minority; they are a monopoly. There are a lot of companies owned by very few people and the services and products on offer enrich these few people.” (Gigaba: It is time to put us first ).
Addressing an ANC Youth League event in Pinetown, Gigaba remarked that there was an agreement in 1993 that white people would continue to have a say in the economy. The ANC stayed committed to this, “but now has come a time for change. It is time to put us first.” Continue reading “If monopolies are the problem, start dismantling the worst: the State-owned Enterprises”
Tourism is not a clearly defined industry in the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC). The key factor in the Tourism Satellite Account for South Africa is to relate purchases by tourists to the total supply of these goods and services. Quantification of tourism enterprise numbers does not form part of the national assessments; yet it was necessary to know how many tourism-related enterprises could be impacted by shale gas production in the study area of the Karoo.
So how did we endeavour to solve this problem?
Continue reading “Challenges in assessing the potential impacts of shale gas production on tourism in the Karoo”
EOSA 