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This exploratory research attempted to devise an additional simple means to predict economic change in South Africa. It was envisaged that economic turnaround could be predicted at an earlier stage than the RMB/BER Business Confidence Index, the FNB/BER Consumer Confidence Index and the South African Reserve Bank’s Leading Indicator using calculus and existing economic indicators. This research used the inflection point of the rate of change of the South African Reserve Bank’s Leading Indicator as the possible predictor of possible economic change in South Africa. This calculation produced what was referred to as the Leading-Leading Indicators. The research also analysed, using graphical and statistical methods, the ability of the RMB/BER Business Confidence Index, the FNB/BER Consumer Confidence Index and the South African Reserve Bank’s Leading Indicator to predict economic change in South Africa. The research indicated that the proposed Leading-Leading Indicators were a poor predictor of economic change. It also indicated that whilst the RMB/BER Business Confidence Index, the FNB/BER Consumer Confidence Index and the South African Reserve Bank’s Leading Indicator appeared to have good predicting possibilities when analysed graphically, due to autocorrelation, statistically, these economic indicators are also poor predictors of economic change. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

<p>The ?Great Recession? of 2007 created havoc in the homebuilding industry, more than any other previous economic down cycle. Countless seasoned local homebuilders across the country did not survive. The impact of their failure on the economy, community, employment, lenders, suppliers, and subcontractors was devastating. While previous studies have sought to identify the symptoms and causes of business failure, very little research has been done on home builder business failure due to acts, omissions, characteristics, or other events which are non-financial. Specifically, those that are attributable to the failed entities' top management and leadership during the housing crisis and the Great Recession. Therefore, the purpose of this qualitative inquiry is to uncover those nonfinancial factors and help to fill the gap in the literature Additionally, we seek to find specific strategies that could be incorporated into the business models of local homebuilders which allow them to anticipate and navigate turbulent economic times. The ultimate goal of such strategies, however, is to shield the organizations of those builders from the negative effects of recessions and allow them to thrive in the aftermath.

Privatisation has been a key policy in the late 20th century in many countries. In West Germany, the federal government sold most of its corporate industrial shareholdings to private investors between 1949 and 1989. Unlike many other countries, West Germany did not nationalise entire industries after the Second World War. Instead, the portfolio of public enterprises and participations was mainly an inheritance from the Third Reich. The aim of the thesis is to explore the causes of privatisation and the driving and delaying forces in the privatisation process between 1949 and 1989 based on qualitative historical documents. After the sale of participations stemming from the war economy in the early 1950s, the conservative federal government of CDU and CSU and later the conservative-liberal government of CDU, CSU and FDP under the Federal Chancellors Konrad Adenauer (CDU) and Ludwig Erhard (CDU) pursued a larger scale privatisation programme by issuing people's shares between 1959 and 1965. The programme featured social elements and aimed at the property formation of employees and a wide dispersion of shares in the society. In the 1970s, public enterprises expanded under a social-liberal government of SPD and FDP, until a conservative-liberal government of CDU, CSU and FDP under Federal Chancellor Kohl (CDU) sold most of the remaining federal participations in industrial enterprises between 1984 and 1989. The total volume of privatisation as measured by revenues remained modest compared to other West European countries and strong political resistance within the government parties CDU and CSU manifested in the process. Findings indicate a high continuity of thought and policy patterns from the 1950s until the end of the 1980s while the main reasons for privatisation shifted slightly. In the 1950s and 1960s, privatisation was primarily motivated by fiscal reasons - access to equity capital proved to be limited for the growing federal enterprises. Privatisation in the 1980s was caused by re-interpretations of the economic situation due to globally changing conditions and increased international competition. Hence, it can be interpreted as a lagged response to market crisis in the 1970s. Ideological shifts of paradigm did not drive privatisation. Rather, advocates of ordoliberalism focused on other economic reforms in the 1950s and liberal ideas in the 1980s co-developed with privatisation politics. For many decades, public enterprises were not viewed as ineffcient per se as long as they were operating in competitive markets. This perception only began to change slowly in the 1980s.

This dissertation develops a Hobbesian reading of the texts of Adam Smith and Karl Marx on economic development. The individualist tradition in social theory starts with the assumption that the social behavior of individuals is driven by self-interest. Thomas Hobbes deduced from this that granting freedom to individuals would inevitably lead to social chaos and generalized misery. Smith argued that granting freedom to individuals is a necessary condition of further economic development. He admitted that freedom leads to struggles over who is to control a society's resources and surplus product. This wastes resources and inhibits economic development. But attempts to prevent such struggles cannot succeed. The solution is to create social structures where how well individuals do in such struggles accurately reflects the extent to which they use resources productively and innovate better methods of production. This can be done by making everyone dependent on markets and forcing everyone (entrepreneurs, workers and consumers) to compete against everyone else in markets. Marx struggled with and transformed the concepts and arguments of Smith, especially those concerning struggles relating to the production, distribution and uses of the surplus product. He argued that the Smithian process of economic development is also a Hobbesian process of exploitation of the workers who produce the wealth. He struggled to analyze the various ways in which the processes of economic development and exploitation mold and shape each other, treating each as a contributing condition of existence of the other, and neither as the determining cause. There is an ongoing debate and tension within the individualist tradition between a neo-Smithian approach (the structure and distribution of property rights are the essential keys to understanding any historical situation) and a neo-Hobbesian approach (the types and distribution of power are the essential keys). Despite Marx's attempt to go beyond this dichotomy and construct an antiessentialist analysis of how the various aspects of historical situations mutually overdetermine each other, a similar dichotomy has dominated the Marxian tradition after Marx.

The dissertation develops and demonstrates a new Marxist approach to the epistemological problem of cognitive modernism, the problem of knowing the true laws of economic reality. This new approach is an antiessentialist and postmodernist critique of versions of Deweyan pragmatism. In American economics, versions of Deweyan pragmatism provide epistemological justification for the verity and primacy of two different economic theories of the world: the American Institutionalism of Thorstein Veblen and the Chicago School of Milton Friedman. Each school uses Deweyan pragmatism to ground its claim to be a science, and each uses Deweyan pragmatism to prove its contention that it offers the correct scientific analysis and view of the fundamental laws of operation of the economy. The dissertation demonstrates that Deweyan pragmatism cannot provide such justification. The primary reason is that Deweyan pragmatism, like all other philosophies of science, is subject to the epistemological problem of cognitive modernism. It is thus unable to provide objective, transdiscursive, and essential knowledge of economic reality. Chapter 1 is an introduction to modernist methodology in economics. It situates Deweyan pragmatism within the tradition of economic modernism. Chapter 2 examines the Deweyan pragmatism of Veblen's American Institutionalism. Chapter 3 examines the Deweyan pragmatism of Friedman's Chicago School. Both schools offer Deweyan pragmatisms as theories of knowledge which prove the truth of each's theory of society. Chapter 4 offers a postmodern critique of both modernist versions of Deweyan pragmatism. The analysis suggests several conclusions. First, for such different and directly opposed theories to claim a common affiliation to Deweyan pragmatism must mean that they understand that affiliation in fundamentally different ways. Second, by presenting different versions of pragmatism it becomes clear that it is not possible to discover the real Dewey, nor is it possible to evade the partiality of all readings of Dewey's philosophy. Third, by contesting pragmatism itself, I demonstrate that the cognitive modernist quest for certain foundations is a failed one, and that all knowledge products in economics are bound by the cultural conditions and discursive fields in which they are produced.

This dissertation studies the influence of the level of the real exchange rate on economic development. It first provides an econometric evaluation of this relationship. The main finding is that competitive real exchange rates tend to be associated with higher economic growth. The association is especially strong and statistically significant for developing countries. It then develops a historical narrative and episode analyses of several Latin American countries since the post-Second World War, in which the relationship is further investigated. There are three main findings. First, Latin American countries have experienced external and financial crises with immediate and/or long-lasting negative effects on growth that resulted from persistent real exchange rate overvaluation. Second, the most successful episodes of growth acceleration in the region have occurred in periods during which the governments aimed at maintaining stable and competitive real exchange rates. Finally, the analysis shows that currency over and undervaluation emerged as a result of explicit economic policies. This finding suggests that governments can use economic policy to manage the level and volatility of the real exchange rate to promote economic development. How macroeconomic policy needs to be managed to that end is evaluated with a formal model. The model shows that exchange rate policy targeting a competitive currency would more likely accelerate growth if it is implemented in coordination with domestic demand management policies that prevent non-tradable price inflation and wage management policies that coordinate the pace of wage increases with tradable productivity growth. An empirical illustration of these results is carried out through a comparative study of Argentina during the 2000s and Chile between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s.

This dissertation focuses on class in two senses of the term. First, it analyzes the conditions under which members of an economic class, a group defined by some common economic interest or position, may develop a collective identity, a consciousness of their common interests, and a capacity for collective action in furtherance of these interests. In particular, it is a case study of the U.S. capitalist class, especially the very largest non-financial companies (and their executives and directors), and its political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This aspect of the dissertation focuses on the formation of the Business Roundtable, the decisions of the largest U.S. industrial companies to join the Roundtable and its predecessor organizations, and the Roundtable's approach to recruiting new members. Second, the dissertation concerns class as a particular kind of social process, the division of the social product between workers and employers. In particular, it analyzes trends in the labor and capital shares of U.S. national income during the postwar period and especially during the 1960s business-cycle expansion. It explores the role of fluctuations of unemployment in the changing balance of power between labor and capital and in turn on their income shares, and the role of these changes in galvanizing the U.S. capitalist elite into concerted political action.

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