Can South Africa Avoid a Malthusian Positive Check?

Literature › Works

Charles Simkins (2001). Can South Africa Avoid a Malthusian Positive Check?. Daedalus, Vol. 130, No. 1 (Why South Africa Matters). MIT Press on behalf of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Type	journal article
Scope	Post-1994 South African economy
Method	mixed
Period studied	1900–2000
Regions	South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa
Themes	demography urbanisation, inequality poverty unemployment, education human capital, macro fiscal finance debt, labour markets wages, comparative theory, transition post apartheid
Citation key	simkins2001

Argument

Simkins asks whether South Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic will act as a Malthusian positive check, reversing a century of falling mortality. He uses Malthusian and neo-Malthusian theory as a checklist of social and economic vulnerabilities and tests it against South African data. Per-capita income has stagnated since 1981, savings and investment are low and foreign finance is fragile. Productivity is poor, unemployment is selective and very high, public social spending crowds out infrastructure, and the education system is expensive but inefficient. He concludes that many Malthusian conditions are present and that mortality will rise sharply in the early twenty-first century. The size of the rise will depend on drug prices, health-system capacity, education and political leadership.

Evidence and method

Census data (1904, 1996), October Household Surveys 1994-99, the 1995 Income and Expenditure Survey linked to the OHS (28,585 households, LOWESS consumption analysis), Reserve Bank national accounts, antenatal HIV prevalence surveys, the Actuarial Society (ASSA) AIDS model, UN and CIA data, SAIRR surveys, and secondary demographic work (Sadie, Peires, Livi-Bacci).

Findings

• Real GDP per capita roughly doubled between 1946 and 1981, then fell. (p. 13)

  Between then and 1981, GDP per capita in 1995 prices rose from R 8,290 to R 16,437, just about doubling in thirty-five years.

• The first ANC government stabilised but did not improve average living standards. (p. 13)

  GDP per capita in 1999 was virtually the same as in 1994, so the first ANC government presided over a stabilization but not an improvement in average living standards.

• Gross fixed capital formation was high through most of the apartheid-era growth period. (p. 14)

  rarely dropped below 20 percent between 1946 and 1985 and was generally above 25 percent between 1964 and 1981.

• Manufacturing total factor productivity growth slowed and turned negative. (p. 16)

  From 1963-1974 it was 0.3 percent, from 1974-1981 it was 0.3 percent, and from 1981-1990 it was -0.5 percent.

• Capital per worker rose sharply from 1980 while employment fell, during a period of high unemployment. (p. 17)

  In constant 1995 prices, the ratio rose by over 80 percent between 1980 and 1999, with most of the rise occurring in the second decade. Employment dropped by 15 percent over the period.

• Rather than being diluted uniformly, capital is concentrated on some workers while others are unemployed. (p. 17)

  The South African labor market, instead of spreading the capital stock over all available workers, spreads it over only some of them and assigns the rest to unemployment.

• Apartheid retarded urbanisation and shaped the rural population distribution. (p. 11)

  Apartheid had two effects on this distribution: it retarded urbanization, particularly from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and it affected the distribution of the rural population

• Low farm unemployment reflects tied residence and tight control over farm populations. (p. 19)

  The relatively low rate of unemployment on commercial farms reflects generally tight control over the population on those farms where residence is tied to employment

• Neo-Malthusian pressure on savings is detectable: each child raises household consumption. (p. 15)

  Each child increased consumption by 0.66 percent (the coefficient was significant at the 1 percent level)

• Matriculation pass rates fell sharply despite rising enrolment, indicating an inefficient education system. (p. 20)

  the pass rate has dropped from 87 percent in 1979 to 49 percent in 1998

• HIV prevalence among antenatal clinic attendees rose explosively in the 1990s. (p. 9)

  The series starts in 1990, when 0.7 percent of such women were found to be HIV-positive. By 1993, the infection rate had risen to 4 percent and by 1996 to 14.2 percent.

• The ASSA model projects the population peaking and then falling because of AIDS. (p. 10)

  The model projects that the population will peak at fifty million in 2011 before it starts to fall.