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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 for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Type journal article
Scope Post-1994 South African economy
Method mixed
Period studied 1904–1999 (with projections to 2011)
Regions South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa
Themes demography urbanisation, inequality poverty unemployment, education human capital, transition post apartheid, macro fiscal finance debt, bantustans removals influx, comparative theory
Citation key simkins2001a

Argument

Simkins asks whether South Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic will become a Malthusian positive check, reversing a century of falling mortality. He builds a checklist of neo-Malthusian conditions from the Malthus literature and tests it against South African data on population, savings and investment, productivity, the capital/labour ratio, public spending, unemployment and education. Several conditions are present: stagnant per capita income, low savings, poor productivity, rising unemployment, crowding out of infrastructure spending and an inefficient education system. Apartheid appears only as a legacy that shaped the spatial distribution of population and unemployment. He concludes that mortality will rise sharply in the early twenty-first century, with the extent depending on leadership, health-system capacity and policy.

Evidence and method

Population censuses (1904, 1996), life-table reconstructions (Sadie; Simkins), HIV antenatal clinic surveys, the Actuarial Society AIDS model, South African Reserve Bank national accounts, the 1995 Income and Expenditure Survey linked to the October Household Survey (28,585 households), October Household Surveys 1994-98, the 1996 Census, UN Human Development Reports, CIA World Fact Book, SAIRR surveys, and the Wright, Leibbrandt and Bell TFP study.

Findings

  • Real GDP per capita 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 delivered stabilisation, not improvement, in average incomes. (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.

  • Financial sanctions forced a reduction in foreign debt, with savings exceeding investment from 1985 to 1994. (p. 14)

    as a consequence of financial sanctions, South Africa was forced to reduce its foreign debt in relation to GDP.

  • Manufacturing TFP growth declined from the 1950s to negative in the 1980s. (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 intensity rose sharply in the private sector 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.

  • The labour market concentrates capital on some workers and leaves the rest unemployed rather than diluting it across all. (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 reshaped rural settlement. (p. 11)

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

  • Low farm unemployment reflects tied residence and tight control rather than a healthy labour market. (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

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

    By 1993, the infection rate had risen to 4 percent and by 1996 to 14.2 percent. In 1998 it was 22.8 percent, and in 1999 it was 22.4 percent.

  • South Africa's human development ranking is far below its income ranking. (p. 20)

    In 1999, South Africa's human development index was 0.695, placing it 101st in the world.

  • Simkins does not attempt to quantify the demographic effect of apartheid. (p. 4)

    No attempt has been made to estimate the effect of apartheid on mortality or on population size.