SOUTH AFRICAN PROVINCES – Page 2

Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Local economic development (LED), Municipal audits, Municipal efficiency, Municipal governance, Municipal legislative compliance

If you think a clean municipal audit is scarce, try to get a call answered quickly

Are we becoming a nation that celebrate losses? After each of the many Springbok losses ex Bok coach Allister Coetzee oversaw, he found “much positive to build on”. When reacting to the Auditor General’s scathing report about the financial management at local level, Zweli Mkhize, Minister of Cooperative Governance & Traditional Affairs and his deputy Andries Nel reminded me of Coetzee.

The Auditor General (AG) reported:

A 75% deterioration in in unauthorised expenditure to a level of R28.3 billion – a figure higher than the expected income from the increase in the VAT rate;
Team Failing Clean Audit Municipalities trumped team Clean Audit Municipalities by 224 – 33, a loss comparable to the All Black’s 57 – 0 trashing of the Boks, though damaging not only South Africans’ enthusiasm, but their financial well-being too;

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Anti-business, Black economic empowerment (BEE), Black-owned businesses, Business incubation, Cooperatives, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Free State, Job creation and unemployment, National Gazelles Programme, Preferential procurement

SA’s fight against unemployment: The importance of pet food, popcorn & detergents in the quest for growth

Johannes Wessels
@johannesEOSA1

On a sunny autumn morning in Bloemfontein I visited a business hand-picked by Government as a National Gazelle: one of the firms Government believes has the potential for massive growth and substantial job creation to attack the three-headed dragon of inequality, unemployment and poverty.

Popcorn & Flat Bread

The National Gazelles Programme is financed (well, by tax-payers) through SEDA (Small Enterprise Development Agency) and the Department for Small Business Development (DSBD). In the first phase 40 firms were identified in “10 priority industry sectors aligned with the National Development Plan and SEDA’s SME strategy”. The recruitment of the next batch is underway. (In enterprise literature, a Gazelle is defined as a company that grows by at least 20% per annum for 4 successive years)

Having covered the decline in the number of formal businesses and how company losses now exceed taxable company income , as well as Government’s failure to create a business-friendly environment , the focus is now on the positive steps Government has taken to promote private enterprise.

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Agriculture, CITIES, TOWNS AND SETTLEMENTS, Demographic-entrepreneurial relationships, Eastern Cape, Enterprise richness, Small towns, Tourism & hospitality services, Town resilience

The resilience of some small towns in the Karoo

A new article in the Journal of Arid Environments (see reference below) examines the ‘Small Town Paradox’ in eight small towns in the Eastern Cape Karoo. Normalised data (enterprise numbers per thousand residents) and estimates of enterprise richness were used in the comparisons. Willowmore, Steytlerville and Jansenville outperformed Aberdeen, Hofmeyr, Steynsburg, Venterstad and Pearston in terms of total enterprises per 1000 residents as well as enterprises per 1000 residents in the tourism & hospitality services and agricultural products and services sectors. In fact, in some measures these towns even outperformed the larger towns of Graaff-Reinet, Cradock, Somerset East and Middelburg. Over some seven decades, the enterprise richness of Willowmore, Steytlerville and Jansenville increased (like those of the larger towns) whereas the enterprise richness of the other five small towns decreased. Hausmann et al. (2017) postulated that productive knowledge is a main determinant of the wealth/poverty of nations. I think this is also true for towns and used enterprise richness as a proxy for the levels of productive knowledge in the towns.

The resilience of towns is now a hot scientific topic. It refers to the ability of towns to respond successfully to adverse changes. Some do it well and some not; hence the ‘Small Town Paradox’. The decline of agriculture, particularly wool farming, in the Karoo stressed many Karoo towns. The study was done to determine if resilience was present in the Eastern Cape Karoo. It was.

The article demonstrates two important issues: 1. There are useful measures whereby the strengths/weaknesses of the entrepreneurial development of South African towns can be compared. 2. Productive knowledge is probably an important component of the resilience of South African towns.

References

Toerien, DF (2018) The ‘Small Town Paradox’ and towns of the Eastern Cape Karoo, South Africa. Journal of Arid Environments. Available free of charge for a limited period at:
https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WwV0Vu7-m4sz

Hausmann, R, Hidalgo, CA, Bustos, S, Coscia, M, Chung, S, Jiminez, J, Simoes, A & Yildirim, MA. (2017) The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity. Center for International Development, Harvard University.

Agriculture, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Free State, Job creation and unemployment, Medium sized enterprises

The ‘cigarettes and whisky conundrum’ and the advice of the Red Queen

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.

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Corruption, Eastern Cape, ECONOMIC POLICY AND STRATEGY, Enterprise friendly environment, Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, Municipal efficiency, North West, Northern Cape, Public service delivery, Western Cape

Fragmentation of South Africa: Is the ANC succeeding where the NP failed?

“Remember, South Africa as a unitary state is a recent experiment and the jury is still out to assess its success or failure…” These words by Lawrence Schlemmer, one of the foremost analytical minds in SA during the latter quarter of the 20thC are today far more relevant than when he uttered them in 1996 when we were enjoying a drink whilst waiting at the late Jan Smuts Airport on delayed flights. Having just read Jacques Pauw’s The President’s Keepers I was starkly reminded of Lawrie’s words.

Lawrie Schlemmer

South Africa is unravelling…

I had the privilege of meeting Lawrie when he was a strategy advisor to the Urban Foundation in the years 1987 onwards. His sharp intellect and wit made him an impressive debater. He was totally independent – apart from his utter dependence on nicotine.

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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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