Fiona Tregenna

Africa remains the least industrialised region in the world. Yet industrialisation is critical for growth and catching up, as well as for development more broadly. This article begins by discussing industrialisation in Africa through the lens of Thandika Mkandawire’s writings on the subject, within the context of his broader thinking on development. In particular, it reflects on his perspectives on structural change and industrialisation; the phases of industrialisation and deindustrialisation in Africa; the political economy of industrialisation in Africa; social policy and industrialisation; and trade and regional integration. The author provides an analysis of some key issues pertaining to industrial development and policy in Africa and argues that the weaknesses of industrialisation in Africa, and the periodic reversals through premature deindustrialisation, have not only hampered economic growth and development, but have also influenced the political economy of African countries, with wider social and political effects. Similarly, state capacity for industrial policy is built through ‘learning by doing’ in the actual practice of industrial policy. Amongst the key topical issues discussed in the article for industrialisation in Africa are upgrading and technological progress, regional integration, and the greening of industrialisation. A vision is put forward for ‘Transformative Industrialisation for Africa’ (TIfA).

The article “Enterprising Women in Southern Africa: When Does Land Ownership Matter?”, written by “Zuzana Brixiová, Thierry Kangoye, Fiona Tregenna”, was originally published Online First without Open Access.

Limited access to finance remains one of the major barriers for women entrepreneurs in Africa. This paper presents a model of start-ups in which firms’ sales and profits depend on their productivity and access to credit. However, due to the lack of collateral assets such as land, female entrepreneurs have more constrained access to credit than do men. Testing the model on data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys in Eswatini, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe, we find land ownership to be important for female entrepreneurial performance in terms of sales levels. These results suggest that the small Southern African economies would benefit from removing obstacles to female land tenure and enabling financial institutions to lend against movable collateral. Although land ownership is linked with higher sales levels, it is less critical for sales growth and innovation where access to short term loans for working capital seems to be key.

At the time of Marx’s birth two centuries ago, the Industrial Revolution was well underway, and the economic and social changes which it wrought formed the backdrop to Marx’s own ideas. The advanced economies of the world were then industrialising, yet today most countries are deindustrialising. What light can a Marxist analysis shed on sectoral structure, sectoral specificity and sectoral change in the early 21st century? A Marxist approach is distinctive and valuable in how it approaches these sectoral issues, and the following interrelated aspects are discussed here: classifying activities in the first instance according to position in the circuit of capital rather than by sectors; a non-phenomenological approach to classifying activities; a non-physicalist conception of commodities; underscoring the extent of intra-sectoral heterogeneity; recognising the importance of manufacturing and of industrialisation; and implications for analysing changes in sectoral structure.

Although South Africa's growth performance has improved somewhat in recent years, it has generally been poor over the last few decades. This article uses Chenery's factor decomposition method to analyse the sources of growth in South Africa from 1970 to 2007. Using input–output data, the growth of each subsector is decomposed into components associated with export growth, import substitution, growth in domestic demand and growth in intermediate demand. The results highlight a dependence on domestic demand expansion as a source of growth since 2000, especially for manufacturing. Subsectors that relied primarily on domestic demand expansion generally performed relatively poorly. Technological change is the only component of growth with a consistently positive and statistically significant correlation with subsectoral growth. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of growth in South Africa, particularly in terms of subsectoral dynamics.

This article empirically analyses the state of inequality in South Africa. International comparisons show South Africa to be among the most unequal countries in the world. The levels of income inequality and earnings inequality are analysed with a range of measures and methods. The results quantify the extremely high level of inequality in South Africa. Earnings inequality appears to be falling in recent years, with relative losses in the upper-middle parts of the earnings distribution. Decomposing income inequality by factor source reveals the importance of earnings in accounting for overall income inequality. The article concludes by observing that, internationally, significant sustained decreases in inequality rarely come about without policies aimed at achieving that, and suggests that strong policy interventions would be needed to reduce inequality in South Africa to levels that are in the range typically found internationally.

(2011). A new growth path for South Africa? Review of African Political Economy: Vol. 38, No. 130, pp. 627-635.