Post-apartheid economic policy, governance and corruption¶
How should post-apartheid economic policy, governance and institutions (GEAR, decentralisation, corruption, traditional authority, migration) be evaluated?
Works engaging the debate: 24
Positions¶
- Neoliberal GEAR critiqued (Bond) vs market-friendly macro stability
- Continuity vs rupture in corruption and migration regimes
- Civil society demobilised vs revived
Evidence base¶
The debate has been argued from a narrow and uneven evidentiary base. Only a handful of works use systematic quantitative series. The macroeconomic strand rests mainly on South African Reserve Bank national accounts, sectoral capital-stock and Quarterly Bulletin series. Heintz (2000) runs fixed-effects panels of net investment rates for seven sectors over 1965-95 against after-tax profit rates, the user cost of capital and an unrest index built from prison population, detentions and strikes drawn from the SAIRR Survey of Race Relations. Fedderke (2006) synthesises pooled mean group and ARDL estimates on manufacturing panels of 28-46 sectors, effective protection for 38 sectors (1988-98) computed from Customs and Excise collections, mark-ups, WEFA and Chamber of Mines mining data, and the Fedderke-de Kadt-Luiz institutional indices (1935-97). Rustomjee (1991) compares IMF Direction of Trade partner reports with South African trade returns and adds IFS errors and omissions to estimate capital flight of $37.1bn over 1970-88. World Bank (1994) relies on a World Bank macroeconometric model estimated on 1960-92 data but names no underlying series. Sender (1994) answers with MERG's own model projections and a single SARB Bulletin citation. Demographic and migration claims draw on census microdata. Zuberi et al. (2005) uses the 1991 full count and the 10% and 30% samples of the 1996 census, October Household Surveys 1995-98 and a 15% sample of death notifications. Kanyenze (2004) assembles mine-employment tables (foreign share 72% in 1970, 42% by 1989) from ILO/SAMAT and Crush and Williams, together with SAMP household surveys in four supplier states.
The governance, corruption and civil-society strands are largely qualitative and documentary. On fiscal decentralisation, (Wittenberg (2003a)) and Wittenberg (2003b) use National Treasury Division of Revenue tables (1999/00-2005/06), the equitable-share formulae, Auditor-General audit outcomes (5% of municipal accounts failed in 2000/01, 77% in 2001/02) and the Alderman et al. poverty imputation from the 1996 census and 1995 IES. Inman and Rubinfeld (2005) draws on the 1995 Financial and Fiscal Commission recommendations and the authors' own grant estimates. The corruption literature catalogues official inquiries: the Information (1978), Development Aid (Pickard 1992), Parsons, Lebowa, Skweyiya and Kumleben commissions, Auditor-General and Public Protector reports, TRC records, opinion surveys (IDASA, World Values Survey, TI CPI) and the press (Lodge (1998); Hyslop (2005); Van Vuuren (2006)). Rubin (1997a) pieces together apartheid debt from secondary compilations and press reports. Work on civil society and traditional authority uses case material. Bond (2004) draws on Johannesburg council minutes, Johannesburg Water tariff schedules, World Bank documents, attitude surveys and press crowd estimates. Beall et al. (2005) draws on eThekwini interviews, a city manager's newsletter, KZN Hansard and 2004 provincial returns. Crush and McDonald (2001) uses the Aliens Control Act, policy papers, deportation counts and amnesty application data. Overall, newspapers (9 works), post-1994 statutes (5) and Treasury documents (4) are the most-used sources.
Contested evidence¶
On GEAR and macro stability, the two sides largely rest on different models rather than disputed readings of the same data. World Bank (1994) simulates fiscal and wage expansion as self-defeating within a World Bank model. Sender (1994) counters with MERG projections and denies that any South African evidence links reduced intervention to business confidence. Neither presents investment time series. The investment literature does share data: both (Heintz (2000)) and Fedderke (2006) use SARB capital stock series and the Fedderke-de Kadt-Luiz instability index. They disagree on mechanism. Heintz finds profit rates and distributive unrest dominant, with the user cost of capital insignificant. Fedderke stresses systemic uncertainty, wages outstripping productivity and product-market mark-ups. Heintz's unrest index may proxy repression or the business cycle, and his validation regression has n=23 and 10% significance. Bond (1998) and Bond (2004) use only illustrative, often unsourced, figures to support a neoliberal-critique reading. Rubin (1997a) asserts GEAR's failure without macro comparison.
On corruption, (Lodge (1998)), (Hyslop (2005)) and Van Vuuren (2006) draw on overlapping commission and Auditor-General material. Lodge and Hyslop read it as concentrated, domain-specific apartheid venality, carried into the post-1994 provinces through homeland administrative continuity. Van Vuuren (2006) reads the same commissions, plus R52bn in secret funds computed from TRC/Auditor-General figures, as systemic grand corruption. Lodge concedes that the apparent post-1994 rise may reflect greater audit and press openness. Because no comparable incidence series exists, these positions cannot be adjudicated.
On migration, (Crush and McDonald (2001)) calls official estimates of millions of undocumented migrants grossly inflated, critiquing the HSRC 1995 method. Kanyenze (2004) reproduces ILO/SAMAT ranges of 2.5-12 million. Crush's continuity claims, such as a rising foreign share of the mine workforce and intensified deportation, rest on unnamed series. On decentralisation, (Inman and Rubinfeld (2005)) treats FFC grant levels as evidence of a self-enforcing federal bargain. Wittenberg (2003b) uses Treasury tables to show high fiscal decentralisation coexisting with political centralisation through the ANC, with weak municipal control. On civil society, (Bond (2004)) infers revival from rough crowd counts (about 20,000 versus 5,000 on 31 August 2002) and press reports. No protest-event or membership data support either demobilisation or revival.
Underused and missing sources¶
Several obvious sources would settle core points but are rarely used. A consistent Auditor-General series of provincial and municipal audit opinions, together with prosecution and disciplinary records, could test continuity in corruption and the homeland-inheritance thesis; it would allow comparison of ex-homeland and other provinces. Home Affairs and police administrative records on deportations, and TEBA/Chamber of Mines employment registers, would test the migration-continuity claims of Crush and McDonald (2001). Protest-event counts, from police or SAIRR records, and SANCO/APF membership registers would test (Bond (2004)). Ward- or traditional-authority-level election returns and chiefs' payroll data would test (Beall et al. (2005)). Municipal and provincial panel data on transfers and service delivery would test (Inman and Rubinfeld (2005)) and Wittenberg (2003b). Firm-level investment, exchange-control and customs transaction records would test (Heintz (2000)), (Fedderke (2006)) and Rustomjee (1991).
The Census 2011 small-area and main-place shapefiles could be linked to traditional authority areas and municipal boundaries, partly filling the spatial gaps noted for Beall et al. (2005) and Wittenberg (2003b). The apartheid legislation timeline supports the institutional-continuity chronologies but adds no new data.
Strength of key claims¶
| Basis | Share of key claims |
|---|---|
| Systematic data | 10% |
| Partial data | 52% |
| Illustrative or anecdotal | 26% |
| Asserted | 12% |
Comparative figures for all debates are on the Literature overview.
Best-evidenced works¶
Fedderke (2006), Zuberi et al. (2005), Heintz (2000), Rustomjee (1991), Wittenberg (2003b), Lodge (1998)
Most-used primary sources¶
Holdings are matched by machine against the archive's file manifest; a dash means no match was found, not that the project certainly lacks the source.
Works and their positions¶
| Work | Position |
|---|---|
| Beall et al. (2005) | Argues against Oomen's 'resurgence' framing and for persistence and adaptation of an evolving institution with both continuities and discontinuities. |
| Beall et al. (2005) | Accepts parallels with indirect rule but finds Mamdani's dichotomy and 'total control' overstated, and says the analogy is limited by the new institutional context. |
| Beall et al. (2005) | Ambivalent: chiefs could be a site of stability if they stay out of electoral politics, but concessions so far come at citizens' expense, especially women's, so chieftaincy remains a faultline. |
| Beall et al. (2005) | Treats chiefly authority and Zulu ethnic politics as historically shaped by colonial and apartheid manipulation as well as by pre-colonial roots. |
| Bond (1998) | Rejects modernisation theory and liberalisation of trade and finance as entrenching uneven development. Advocates capital controls, levies on luxury consumption, debt rescheduling and cheaper, directed credit. |
| Bond (2004) | Argues that civics were demobilised and corporatised after 1994 and that resistance was reborn in autonomous 'new social movements' against the ANC's neoliberalism. |
| Bond (2004) | Opposes cost recovery, the World Bank advice and privatisation; supports free lifeline water and electricity with rising block tariffs. |
| Bond (2004) | Acknowledges the contest and reports Ngwane's critique of autonomism, favouring a socialist, transitional-demand orientation; he rejects the ANC and SACP charge of 'ultra-left'. |
| Crush and McDonald (2001) | Rejects the Home Affairs 'crisis' view as unsupported by research. Treats the IFP-appeasement hypothesis as plausible. Finds the ANC-IFP convergence argument too stark but sees it as pointing to nation-building and identity formation as the deeper cause. |
| Crush and McDonald (2001) | Argues official figures (up to nine million) rest on a fallacious HSRC methodology and that migrants are net contributors and victims more than perpetrators of crime. |
| Crush and McDonald (2001) | Emphasises substantial continuity in enforcement, the contract labour system, and perceptions of Africa as a threat, despite breaks in racial selection, amnesties and refugee law. |
| Fedderke (2006) | Rejects demand-side stimulus: government consumption and inflation lower long-run output, so macroeconomic stability is the proper role. |
| George (2006) | Two waves: unions drove the 1980s transfers to provident funds, employers and consultants drove the 1990s conversions. Consultants (one 'emerging brokerage' in particular) were drivers, not merely facilitators. |
| George (2006) | Finds the literature wrong: in all cases company boards decided and trustees merely implemented. |
| George (2006) | Argues business acted to restore certainty for itself, and members' needs were not the primary motivation of any stakeholder. |
| Giliomee (1995) | Rejects the optimistic view of a 'common society'. He stresses persistent racial and ethnic cleavages and extreme inequality, which make consolidation of liberal democracy unlikely. |
| Heintz (2000) | Argues growth alone is insufficient and favours asset-based redistribution, mild expansion with capital controls, targeted industrial policy and shared productivity gains. |
| Hyslop (2005) | Rejects the polarisation as ideological and unilluminating; the two orders produce different types of corruption, and new forms are layered on old ones, following Lodge. |
| Hyslop (2005) | Partly adopts it. The homelands and the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and Limpopo provincial administrations approximate the 'empty shell' state. He warns of its drift toward cultural essentialism, and says the arms scandal looks more East Asian. |
| Hyslop (2005) | Uses a low/high corruption by high/low growth typology. He argues that South Africa shifted from low-corruption high-growth to high-corruption low-growth as the economy stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s, and that the 1960s boom was compatible with extensive patronage-driven rent-seeking. |
| Hyslop (2005) | Rejects conservative cultural determinism as racialising and homogenising. Argues that Marxist elite-versus-masses accounts cannot explain vertical patronage networks that cut across class lines. |
| Inman and Rubinfeld (2005) | The transition requires central financing of local services and decentralised spending on redistributive services. This reverses the usual efficiency principles, which apply only to the later 'second-order' agenda of growth and efficiency. |
| Kanyenze (2004) | Argues that restrictive controls and deportations treat symptoms and fuel hidden migration. It favours addressing push factors through regional economic cooperation and a rejection of SAP market-driven approaches. |
| Kraak (1995) | Sceptical of voluntarist Affirmative Action and of export-led growth. Favours COSATU-style 'active' labour market policies and democratisation to avoid a new core/periphery divide. |
| Lodge (1998) | Mixed: the apartheid state was relatively efficient, with limited corruption in white-facing bureaucracy. It was heavily corrupt in secret security spending, the homelands and Development Aid, and much present corruption inherits those habits. Lodge argues new post-1994 conditions also generate corruption. |
| Lodge (1998) | Lodge finds South Africa not a typical developing country, with a small state role and personal taxation as a revenue base. Corruption is not only a symptom of modernization; it also flourishes under decentralization, one-party dominance, secrecy and importing business practices into administration. |
| Lodge (1998) | Cites the functional arguments but treats petty venality as harmful, and stresses that corruption diverts scarce development spending. |
| Phakathi (2012) | Sees a shift from coercion to consent but notes that consent can carry intensification and 'soft-touch' coercion, and that empowerment has benefited elites (Williams). |
| Rubin (1997a) | Strongly critical: says conciliating foreign capital has failed, since inflows were small and short-term, and alternatives exist (wealth tax, prescribed assets, exchange controls). |
| Rustomjee (1991) | Favours retaining or strengthening capital controls, monitoring trade and curbing conglomerate power. Warns that export-led growth without anti-flight mechanisms may exacerbate the drain. |
| Sender (1994) | Sender defends MERG's public-investment-led framework and rejects the view that deference to business confidence is a binding constraint. |
| Sender (1994) | Sender argues there is no demonstrated employment loss. He cites South African farm evidence and international studies, and favours a phased national minimum wage set by tripartite Wages Boards. |
| Stott (2008) | Argues private ownership suited deep-level capital-intensive mining, but treats the MPRDA as a negotiated if contested shift to state custodianship. |
| Van Vuuren (2006) | Rejects it. Argues apartheid was systemically corrupt and that the claim of a clean past is 'deeply ignorant or racist'. |
| Van Vuuren (2006) | Stresses an inter-generational continuity of networks, individuals and practices across 1994, and treats this as a legacy of apartheid. |
| Van Wyk (2005) | The ANC was drawn into neo-liberal convergence by business, the NP, international institutions and the collapse of the USSR, which Van Wyk treats as the economic balance of power. |
| Wittenberg (2003a) | Rejects a purely abstract case for decentralisation; costs and benefits depend on institutional design and the social context, following Bardhan. |
| Wittenberg (2003a) | Fiscally very decentralised (per Bahl) but with a centralising drift via ANC party discipline and Treasury dominance; evidence of efficiency gains is as yet inconclusive. |
| Wittenberg (2003b) | The paper holds that benefits depend on institutional design and the balance of forces rather than on any abstract case, and draws on Bardhan and Mookherjee on capture. Apartheid showed decentralisation used to reduce accountability. |
| Wittenberg (2003b) | The paper sees the ANC's accommodation of regional interests and bantustan bureaucracies as shaped by the negotiating balance of forces. It notes a subsequent centralising drift through party discipline and national Treasury dominance. |
| World Bank (1994) | Argues for redistributive growth, with public investment targeted at the poor, but warns that wage-led or deficit-financed redistribution is self-defeating; this is an orthodox, investor-confidence view. |
| Zuberi et al. (2005) | Zuberi and Sibanda find foreign-born and internal migrants more likely to be employed than South African-born nonmigrants, contradicting the view that immigrants are at a disadvantage. |