Thesis (MDF)--Stellenbosch University, 2015. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study examined the causal relationship between foreign direct investment and domestic savings in Zambia. Data over the period 1970–2012 was extracted from the World Development Indicator and Global Economic Monitor Databases (2014). The study employed the Johansen cointegration approach to establish the long-standing relationship between domestic savings and foreign direct investment. In addition, the Granger causality test was also carried out to examine the causal relationship between foreign direct investment and gross domestic savings. The results suggest that although foreign direct investment inflow can lead to domestic savings growth in the short run, in the long run it would substitute domestic savings. This implies that the effect of the increased inflows of foreign direct investment experienced in the recent past may in the long run hurt domestic savings growth in Zambia. Policy makers should therefore improve the governance mechanism for the use and monitoring of foreign direct investment inflows in Zambia and promote diversification away from mining, the main economic activity that accounts for more than 60 percent of direct foreign investment in Zambia. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie het ondersoek ingestel na die oorsaaklikheidsverwantskap tussen direkte buitelandse belegging en binnelandse besparing in Zambië. Data vir die tydperk 1970 tot 2012 is uit die Wêreldbank se databasisse World Development Indicators en Global Economic Monitor (2014) bekom. Die studie het die Johansen-benadering van ko-integrasie gevolg om die lank bestaande verwantskap tussen binnelandse besparing en direkte buitelandse belegging te bepaal. Daarbenewens is die Granger-oorsaaklikheidstoets uitgevoer om die oorsaaklikheidsverwantskap tussen direkte buitelandse belegging en bruto binnelandse besparing te ondersoek. Die resultate dui daarop dat hoewel die invloeiing van direkte buitelandse belegging binnelandse besparing op kort termyn ’n hupstoot sal gee, dit binnelandse besparing op lang termyn sal vervang. Dít impliseer dat die verhoogde direkte buitelandse belegging wat in die onlangse verlede ondervind is, op lang termyn ’n skadelike uitwerking op groei in binnelandse besparing in Zambië kan hê. Beleidsvormers behoort dus die beheermeganisme vir die aanwending en monitering van direkte buitelandse belegging in Zambië te verbeter en diversifikasie aan te moedig weg van mynbou, die vernaamste ekonomiese aktiwiteit in die land wat tans vir meer as 60% van alle direkte buitelandse belegging in Zambië sorg.

published_or_final_version / China Development Studies / Master / Master of Arts in China Development Studies

A model for the explanation of socioeconomic change in West Africa is presented, and tested with data from Zinder province, Niger Republic. A Marxist social formation analysis provides a model of change and continuity in peripheral, precapitalist modes of production, and of economic causality. A regional marketing systems analysis elaborates on the effects of exchange systems upon production systems and suggests quantitative data by which the Marxist model is tested. Marketing arrangements in Niger are discussed. An analysis of the Nigerien economy is presented. The way French, EEC, and Nigerien government policies have shaped the extraversion, mercantilism, and dependence of the economy is clarified. Then, the manipulation of exchange and production within Niger by state marketing agencies is explored. A regional systems analysis of marketing in Zinder province is carried out, including the system's history since precolonial times. The modern systems are described with price correlations, commodity flows, mobile trader circuits and strategies, and consumer behavior. Marketing and relations of production and reproduction in three communities, an agricultural village, a pottery-producing one, and a handicraft tannery were linked. Variations in household morphology and task performance, in gandu and master-apprentice workshop organization, in specialization in output, and in exchange and distribution of resources are related to the hierarchical position and functions of markets in which each community has participated historically. The key hypothesis was confirmed: local modes of production are now articulated with the modern world system. However, local modes have not been completely transformed from their antecedents. The structure of exchange makes it advantageous for foreign entrepreneurs and the Nigerien government to allow local modes to persist, while decapitalization, and tenacious political and reproductive relationships discourage transformation from below. By adding a regional systems perspective to a social formation analysis, a rich and testable description of the factors both facilitating and impeding changes in articulated modes of production was obtained.

Foreign aid is a relatively new form of economic exchange between nations, yet in only a few decades it has become a persistent structural element of the modern world-system. Conventional theories of economic development view foreign aid as a "flow" of financial resources into an economy and argue that it accelerates economic growth in the less developed countries by supplementing the domestic capital resources that are available for development. Dependency theory and the world-system perspective conceive of foreign aid as a "structural" feature of the recipient economy and suggest that it retards economic growth in these countries by reproducing the structural distortion of the economy that was originally established by colonialism and by systematically limiting the ability of the peripheral state to control the development of its economy. These theories suggest contradictory findings which are tested in this dissertation with multiple regression analysis. The analyses parallel the seminal research of Bornschier et al. (1978) on foreign investment and economic growth by simultaneously estimating the effects of both short-term flows and long-term stocks of foreign aid on economic growth. Using a sample of 91 Third World countries, the effects of foreign aid on economic growth are estimated both during a period of relative expansion of the world economy (1970-1978) and during a period of relative recession (1978-1986). My findings lend some support to both theoretical perspectives but the direction of the effects are opposite to those predicted by Bornschier et al. Foreign aid is found to have short-term negative effects on economic growth during both time periods but long-term positive effects on economic growth are statistically significant only for the later time period. The findings from this research clearly suggest that the dependency and world-system perspective must modify its theoretical explanations concerning the relationship between foreign capital flows and economic development to take into account the varied uses of different types of financial resources. They also highlight the importance of recognizing that different phases of the expansion and contraction of the world economy may condition the effects of specific types of core-periphery interactions.

In this thesis the author undertook a poverty and policy analysis. It is argued that it is important to understand the nature, magnitude and context of poverty before one can undertake an informed policy prescription. Existing theories of poverty, welfare regimes and social policies offer a lot of useful lessons for policy, but have limitations in offering a single model for Rwanda. The thesis demonstrated that, not only is Rwandan poverty multifaceted and deep, but it is characterized by a poverty conflict trap that can be traced back to the entire post colonial period. The author argued however that the current policy is not only inefficient in targeting poverty, but it may be unable to meet the challenges of growth, redistribution and conflict mitigation. The thesis, after further analyzing policy options, puts forward a package that is needed to reduce poverty in Rwanda in the long term and to break the poverty conflict trap. The prescribed package is put forward as a comprehensive and institutionalized social policy, which Rwanda so far does not have.

This study examined the role the Malaysian government played in developing the Malaysian economy as a means to eliminating poverty and inequality and explored the lessons South Africa can learn from Malaysia's development experience. Under British colonial rule Malaysia developed a divided multi-ethnic society characterised by gross inequality and high levels of poverty. Jolted by the 1969 race riots and in a major departure from the laissez-faire economic policy, the government embarked on the New Economic Policy in 1970. This ambitious twenty-year social engineering plan ushered in greater state intervention in the economy. It greatly reduced poverty among indigenous Malays and made substantial progress towards achieving inter-ethnic economic parity.

The disparities in the level of development between the richer and poorer regions of Yugoslavia are among the worst in Europe. The level of output per head of the population in 1964 in the poorest of the eight regions was less than one-fifth of its level in the richest, while in the group of the four least developed regions, comprising 40 percent of the country's land area and one-third of its population, it was only one-half of its level in the more developed group. The period 1953-and4 spans twelve years during which the promotion of the development of the backward regions has been a constitutional obligation of the Yugoslav government, and its active regional policy implemented through the uniquely Yugoslav system of decentralised planning. Following the repudiation, in the years 1950-52, of centralised directive planning on the Soviet model, the Yugoslav authorities instituted a system of economic management based on the decentralisation to the enterprise of responsibility for the organisation of current production, combined with the retention by the state organs of control over the "basic proportions of development", specifically, the level and sectoral distribution of investment and foreign trade. The control of investment was made effective through the strong centralisation in the accumulation of investment funds, from taxes on the enterprise, and their allocation in accordance with plan priorities. The authorities were thus able directly to channel a substantial volume of investment funds to the underdeveloped regions. Extensive government intervention in price formation, in addition to tax concessions and the payment of subsidies to enterprises in financial difficulties severely limited the application of profit and loss criteria to the operations of the enterprise. The system of decentralised planning thus provided a very favourable institutional framework for promoting investment and the expansion of output in the underdeveloped regions. Development policy for the backward regions, as for the country as a whole, passed through two main phases during these years. Industrialisation was consistently regarded as the centrepiece of development strategy, with the improvement of agriculture and the expansion of tertiary activities playing, for the most part, only a subsidiary role. Between 1953 and 1956 efforts were concentrated on the build-up of the "basic industries", notably the power industries and heavy metallurgy, a continuation of the policy begun under the First Five-Year Plan in the Stalinist years. From 1957, however, a new strategy was adopted, of "development on a broader front", giving much greater prominence to the expansion of manufacturing and consumer goods' industries. This reorientation gave rise to considerable dispersion in the development efforts in the backward regions, both among industrial sectors and into newly designated centres, in contrast to the narrow range of industries developed in the earlier phase and their concentration in the vicinity of the necessary raw materials. Within this broad pattern, however, the individual underdeveloped regions varied their own development strategies in accordance with their natural resources and other characteristics. In Bosnia- Hercegovenia, which contained a substantial part of Yugoslavia's reserves of coal, iron-ore and water-power, development proceeded rapidly in the earlier years with the expansion of the national priority sectors of coal, steel and electricity, but latterly the transition to a more diversified pattern of industrial development was effected only slowly. The concentration of these resource-based industries into the central parts of the region has left Bosnia-Hercegovenia itself, in spite of substantial local population migration, faced with the internal problem of disparities between its more and less developed areas. Montenegro, the smallest and most remote of the regions, separated from the rest of Yugoslavia by mountain barriers, had initially to devote major efforts and a large volume of investment to the provision of transport facilities before the expansion of production could be begun, and even in 1964 the facilities remained seriously deficient. Because of the region's small size (less than half a million inhabitants) its development strategy comprised only a few individual projects, although the level of investment there was much the highest in Yugoslavia. Macedonia, the most agricultural of the underdeveloped regions, adopted a policy of integrated agricultural and industrial development, the improvement of agriculture being complemented by the establishment of textile, leather and food-processing industries to process agricultural products for the national market. This pattern of development encouraged a high degree of urbanisation in the region, with the concentration of its industries into a number of relatively large centres, each serving its particular agricultural hinterland. For political reasons development efforts for Kosmet, much the poorest of the Yugoslav regions did not begin, on any scale, until after 1957, with the result that development there was scarcely begun. A two-pronged approach, comprising both heavy and light industry, was however being either adopted or planned. Coal, electricity and, eventually, chemical industries were being based on the region's extensive lignite deposits, while non-ferrous metallurgy and related chemicals were being expanded, to exploit local deposits of lead and zinc; complementary to these, the labour-intensive industries of textiles, footwear and food products were being promoted in order to create new industrial employment and thus begin to relieve the acute pressure of agricultural overpopulation. But, in spite of very high levels of investment in the underdeveloped regions, the disparities between the regional groups in the level of output per head tended to increase over the twelve years, as total output in the underdeveloped regions grew rather less rapidly, and population more rapidly, than in the more developed group. This occurred in spite of considerable emigration, most notably from Macedonia. Only in Montenegro, much the smallest of the regions, was a movement towards convergence with the more developed group achieved. The policy of industrialisation was itself successful, in that each of the underdeveloped regions recorded a rate of industrial expansion higher, sometimes substantially higher, than in the more developed group; but their tendency towards lower growth rates in the other economic sectors, combined with the handicap of an output structure in which industry occupied a lesser place more than offset (except in Montenegro) the successful growth of industrial production. The focussing of development efforts on industrial expansion, while in itself successful, was thus concentrated on too narrow a front to achieve a convergent movement in the growth of total output. The cost of the policy of development in the backward regions is difficult to appraise, with the artificial prices for certain items of capital equipment and the payment of subsidies in order to maintain production in unprofitable enterprises.

This thesis investigates the suitability of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) for Saudi Arabia by examining the perceptions of accounting users and preparers. It explores the information needs of the main users of accounting, the factors that represent barriers to the adoption of IFRSs, and the costs and benefits of the adoption of IFRSs. The study compares Saudi Accounting Standards (SASs) and IFRSs. In addition, a questionnaire survey was conducted and semi-structured interviews were carried out to examine the issues in greater depth in order to answer the research questions. The political nature of accounting standards is investigated, as well as theories of accountability and decision usefulness in order to interpret the results and explore to what extent and in what manner these frameworks function in the Saudi environment. The Islamic accountability framework would suggest that companies represented by owners and managers are accountable to their stakeholders’ interests, and owners and managers must protect those interests and disclose everything that may help them to discharge their accountability. However, the findings presented in this thesis suggest that practice of the Islamic accountability framework is limited. The influence of religious factors on the accounting system is limited in some cases as there is inadequate disclosure and transparency, such as a lack of information required for Sharia compliance; this affects users’ ability to make decisions. The results also reveal some evidence that accounting standard setting is dominated by political (rather than ‘user-needs’) considerations. Furthermore, economic factors override social and cultural factors, including religion, in terms of their influence on the accounting system. The results suggest inter alia that religious factors will not represent a barrier to the use of other standards such as IFRSs. The findings suggest that the adoption of IFRSs would contribute to enhancing the quality of financial reporting. The results also reveal that financial reporting prepared on the basis of IFRSs provides more of the information required for decision-making. The results also suggest that there is, to some extent, agreement among participants as to the suitability of IFRSs to Saudi Arabia, and that their benefits would eventually overcome the difficulties and problems that may arise from their adoption, although it is still be necessary to consider certain specific requirements, such as those related to Sharia law.

No description available.

M.Comm. / This study attempts to investigate the validity of Wagner’s law and the Keynesian perspective of a long-run relationship and causality between government expenditure and economic growth in SADC countries from 1988 to 2004. In order to determine the existence of the long-run relationship and causality, a univariate analysis is carried out to assess whether panel series are integrated at the same order. Subsequently, this study finds that all panel series under investigation are indeed integrated of the same order. Therefore, the second stage consists of assessing whether there is cointegration between government expenditure and economic growth. This study applies two procedures of panel cointegration, namely, the Pedroni panel cointegration test and the Kao panel cointegration test. Both procedures find that certainly a long-run relationship exists between government expenditure and economic growth in the SADC. Moreover, since two equations are estimated in this study, there is unidirectional causality. In both equation 1 and 2, the study finds that economic growth Granger causes government expenditure in both the long and the short-run which is consistent with the Wagner’s law than the Keynesian stance.