Includes bibliographical references. / This paper builds on a growing literature on trade-related international technology diffusion. It examines whether South Africa can enhance its productivity by importing machinery and equipment that embodies foreign knowledge from trading partners that do significant amounts of research and development. The focus is on South Africa's manufacturing sector. Furthermore, the paper also examines the role of human capital in the facilitation of the effective adoption of foreign technology. Using trade data from 1976 to 2001 - imports from the European Union, industrialized countries and 'advanced' developing countries - the relationship between capital imports and total factor productivity growth and human capital is analysed using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration. The results show that there is evidence of an equilibrium relationship between the variables; that foreign technology spillovers have taken place in the manufacturing sector, and that the effect on productivity is enhanced by the presence of quality human capital.

Since its inception in 1989, the private water sector of England and Wales has been enlisted as a centrepiece in debates concerning the merits of privatisation. Advocates point to increased environmental performance and increased investment. Critics note a significant retraction of the early free market aspirations and increasingly prescriptive regulation. However, market mechanisms and liberalisation are once again being emphasised in policy, reigniting the debate surrounding the commoditisation of water. This thesis engages directly and critically with Karen Bakker's 'Uncooperative Commodity' approach to the 'reregulation' of the industry, arguing its tenants must be adapted to accommodate these recent developments. While Bakker's earlier accounts of the reregulation of the water industry placed a great emphasis on the geography and biophysical properties of water, later work by both her and her contemporaries have developed more refined and socialised models of how water and society interact to produce temporary regularities in the material world. This thesis argues that an appropriate means of developing Bakker's original thesis would be a greater focus on socio-historical context when exploring the materiality of water, and hence the degree to which water may be transformed into a private commodity. Bob Jessop's Strategic Relational Approach (Jessop 2008) is deployed as a means of describing and relating: (1) the degree to which research can identify underlying mechanisms which govern the outcomes of attempts to commoditise water under capitalist modes of production, (2) the role of the state and politics in flanking or supporting the commoditisation of water and (3) the role of existing discursive-institutional structures in introducing path-dependencies and uneven power geometries which in turn effect the outcomes of collective action towards the commoditisation of water. The thesis documents historical developments in English and Welsh resource planning, regulation, and policy from 1945 to 2012 in order to explain the current structure of the industry, its response to water scarcity, and the origins of the current reform programme. It then focuses on the conflicts and tensions between actors in the industry generated by the current reform programme and their role in affecting the degree of success of the programme itself.