The Evolution of Manufacturing in the Gauteng City-Region: From De-Industrialization to Re-Industrialization?

Abstract

This volume's central theme is city-regions and their changing space economies in the Global South. These are regions that are witnessing new scales of urbanisation, which are integrated by global economic relationships, by transportation infrastructures and, increasingly, by new information and communications technologies. These regions also witness many spheres of government and governance structures. These features shape these regions immensely. Specifically, the volume focuses on the Gauteng City-Region (GCR), the largest agglomeration in a country and on a continent bedevilled by myriad development challenges. This largest agglomeration contributes a third to the South African national economy and a tenth to Africa's gross domestic product (GDP). The volume is timely in many respects. It explores and discusses key development processes, which, while not exhaustive, contribute substantially to informing policy debates around the GCR. The findings also offer potential learning experiences for policy development in other city-regions, especially in the Global South. Across the various chapters, readers, including planners and policy makers in governments, undergraduate and graduate students and scholars in economic geography, economists of various sub-fields of specialisation, are invited to explore:

Re‐Examining the Role of Structural Change and Nonlinearities in a Phillips Curve Model for South Africa

“…Nevertheless, towards the end of the sample period under analysis the slowdown in capital inflows following the Marikana uprising in 2012 and increased socio‐economic instability thereafter (see Smit et al ., ), together with the post‐2013 drop in primary commodity prices (Ashman and Newman, ), all pointed to a reversal in South Africa's favourable balance‐of‐payments position. Based on the concave Phillips curve model in Fig.…”

Introduction to the special section ‘Financialization in South Africa’

“…Since the end of apartheid, access to international capital markets for large South African conglomerates, and their subsequent internationalization, was advocated as ways to achieve higher investment, boosting growth and employment (McGregor and Zalk, 2017). Instead, the rise of finance in South Africa has coincided with a strong decline of the manufacturing sector whose contribution to GDP has halved from its 25% peak in the early 1980s (see Ashman and Newman, 2018 for the de-industrialization of Gauteng, the most important province for manufacturing). Financial services do not necessitate much capital investment.…”