Historical perspectives from Stellenbosch

It has gone quiet on this blog since the end of my research leave in June, but this week I am at the World Economic History Congress and I am finding lots of inspiration for blogs.

The theme of this year's congress is The roots of development and the first session featured James Robinson (of Why nations fail-fame) on the impact of colonialism on development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Colonialism had heterogeneous effects depending on interactions with the density of indigeneous peoples, the disease environment etc. He played up the insitutions angle looking at three types of colonies: those that had some kind of polity before the scramble for Africa, those that received large numbers of white settlers and the others, and imaged what things would have looked like if there were no colonialisation. It is a longer story, but with trade, aid and the cold war kept constant he concluded that colonialisation did not benefit development in Africa (he had a whole example of the problems of indirect rule in Sierra Leone).

The presentation did not mention the new Easterly and Levine paper on the European origins of economic development, discussed here by Johan Fourie. I also wonder about those colonies that had some kind of polity and are a key part of the counterfactual - Lesotho, Swaziland, Rwanda are all small and relatively homogeneous. What role for geography in this story?

The afternoon also had some interesting papers and I attended the session on the Maddison project where issues of measurement and data collection were discussed. It is clear that economic historians have key contributions to make to current debates about, growth, development and inequality.

Stay tuned for more, I am here for the whole week.

 

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Blog log 6/6

Back to reality, oh there goes gravity...

It is a bit early for the final blog log of my research leave, but Economics is calling and today is my last day at the Stats office. So here is the final list:

During the course of the six months, 5 articles have been accepted for publication, four in 2012 and one in 2013:

• KRUGELL, W.F. & MATTHEE, M.  (2012).  “The growth of small firms and access to finance: SA evidence from the World Bank Enterprise Survey”. Journal of Economic and Financial Sciences, 5(1).

• KRUGELL, W.F. & RANKIN, N.  (2012).  “Agglomeration and manufacturing output: Firm-level evidence from South Africa”. Forthcoming in Urban Forum.

• SAAYMAN, M., KRUGELL, W.F. & ROSSOUW, R.  (2012).  “The impact of tourism on poverty in South Africa”.  Forthcoming in Development Southern Africa.

• MATTHEE, M. & KRUGELL, W.F.  (2012).  “Barriers to internationalisation: Firm-level evidence from South Africa”.  Forthcoming in Studia Oeconomica.

• KRUGELL, W.F. & SAAYMAN, M.  (2013).  “Running the green race: Willingness-to-pay evidence from the Two Oceans Marathon 2011.”  Forthcoming in the South African Journal of Research in Sport, Physical Education and Recreation.

And 2 more articles have been submitted for publication:

• BLAAUW, P.F. & KRUGELL, W.F.  (2012).  “Micro-evidence on day labourers and the thickness of labour markets in South Africa”.

• VAN TONDER, C., SAAYMAN, M. & KRUGELL, W.F.  (2012).  “Tourists’ valuation of the Big-5”.

2 of my Master’s students submitted their dissertations for examination in May and will hopefully graduate at the Spring ceremony in September.

I had the opportunity to visit the Beijing Foreign Studies University under a new cooperation agreement.  The visit consisted of two guest lectures and discussions with colleagues at BFSU.

In addition to doing the research, I also tried to promote the work through my blog.  Over the course of the six months I wrote 59 posts.

Throughout the semester I was still involved in a number of activities of the School of Economics.  Chief amongst these were the maintenance of the School’s Facebook page and setting up a blog for the School.  For the blog I have written 28 posts as well as developed the resources for Open day and the Reserve Bank’s MPC challenge.

Additional activities included:

Making a geographical economics presentation at the ERSA workshop hosted in Potch in January.

5x Master’s dissertations examined.

1x PhD thesis examined.

1x wrote part of a report prepared for InvestNW on the IPAP-2.

1x article for Woord & Daad (with Melville Saayman).

1x Kindle single book published (with Riaan Rossouw).

1x article reviewed for SAJE

1x SARChl chair evaluated for the NRF.

3x ITEA evaluations.

2x radio interviews.

2x articles in the media.

I would like to thank everyone involved for this opportunity, specifically:

Prof Wilma Viviers at the School of Economics.

Prof Elsabe Loots of the faculty of Economic and Management Sciences.

Prof James Ellison at Statistics, for providing me with hide-away office on campus.

All my co-authors and collaborators for their enthusiasm and their patience.

Back at Economics I will be acting School Director from the 1st of July and teaching ECON621 in the second semester. Keep watching this space.

  

Posts that I liked

I recently came across pages and posts that I quickly want to share:

• Future Cape Town has a new web page. Lots of news and views for someone who is interested in cities.
• I'm still looking for something similar for Joburg. If you know about anyone writing about Johannesburg from a urban economics, geography, even town planning perspective, please send in a comment and a link. In the meantime I have come across a nice blog arguing that Joburg rocks!
• Finally, it is not a geography story, but I enjoyed Johan Fourie's latest post on economic history, his study of the 18th century Cape Colony and what it means for the colonisation of Mars. Private space flight is in the news, Voyager is heading into interstellar space and one day we might have companies out on Mars!

Enjoy.