Municipalities in South Africa play a pivotal role in the provision of basic services to communities. However, local government as a sphere in the country is notorious for its spending inefficiency, which is cited as a major factor in service delivery failure. This paper quantifies inefficient expenditure at the local government level by estimating efficiency scores for a sample of 129 municipalities in South Africa from the 2005/2006 to the 2009/2010 municipal financial years. In essence, this paper examines the technical efficiency of municipalities by using the nonparametric free disposable hull approach and finds that 10 municipalities are constantly efficient over the period. On average, input efficiency scores range from 42% to 46%, suggesting that, in general, municipalities can achieve the same output levels with over 50% less resources. Quantitatively for the 2009/2010 financial year, this amounts to a total of R80 billion being spent inefficiently, which equates to R220 million being “wasted” per day.
Concerns about the human effects of climate change have contributed to forecasts of how populations in drought-prone and flood-prone areas would respond to these events. Empirical studies have predicted that human migration has been among the critical resilient strategy in responding to the impact of climate change. To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the climate-migration relationship, the impacts of climate change on international migration flows from sub-Saharan Africa nations to South Africa are investigated empirically in this paper. The study employed static and dynamic models and panel data from 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, spanning 1990 to 2017. The findings are as follows: (1) The analysis shows that historical temperature has a positive and statistically significant effect on outmigration in agriculture-dependent nations.(2) The analysis shows that agricultural value added as a share in gross domestic product has a negative and statistically significant effect on outmigration in agriculture-dependent nations.(3) The results also show that geographic location and development level of a country, in addition to dependency on agriculture, are key factors in the climate change-international migration nexus. Policy implications are discussed.
| INTRODUCTIONIt is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the causes and impacts of climate change across the world and in all aspects of life. Climate change, in particular, is responsible for decreased agricultural productivity and increased food insecurity (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2019). The potential for large-scale movement of portions of the human population is one frequently cited response to the
The decline in the world economy that followed the 2008-2009 global economic crisis had detrimental effects on most economies. Not enough attention has been paid to the process through which crisis-related pressures affected regional economies and sub-national governments. A regional computable general equilibrium model was developed to analyse impacts of the crisis on the regional economy of the Free State province in South Africa. Key results included a general fall in prices in the province, a fall in demand in sectors that are more vulnerable to global conditions, falling wages and declining incomes for agents and provincial government.
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