Mapping ICT Access in South Africa

What does it take for entrepreneurs to be effective competitors? What are the factors affecting entry and participation in sectors where there are historically strong incumbent firms? Opening the South African Economy brings to light the challenges of concentration, inequality and exclusion in different sectors of the South African economy.

In any system of innovation, the constituency of participating individuals plays a large role in determining its strengths and weaknesses. A fundamentally mobile resource, individuals are influenced by a complex nexus of factors prompting their movements. This book is a review of the literature on the topic and is designed as a resource for anyone interested in analysing human mobility and the factors and policies through which it influences innovation.

It is generally accepted that the gap between the earnings of unskilled and semi-skilled workers on the one hand, and skilled and highly skilled workers, on the other, narrowed in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s. This paper investigates whether the gap between the real earnings of highly skilled and low-skilled workers in the formal sector of the South African economy continued to narrow after this countrys transition to democracy.

For a long time economists have warned that abundant natural resources are bad for economic development because their exploitation stunts manufacturing exports, favours rent-seeking activities by politically well-connected people, and generally leads to unsustainable policies for which, as so often, the poor end up paying the price with lost growth and opportunity. But over the last few years the so-called resource curse has been revisited as historically uninformed, theoretically unsatisfactory, empirically incorrect, and largely useless for development policy.