This dissertation seeks to critically investigate, examine and describe how four large South African construction companies have responded to and engaged with Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE). Using these companies as a case study, namely, Murray & Roberts, WBHO, Group Five and Basil Read, the paper highlights the extent to which BEE and later B-BBEE implementation has been effective in so far as meeting its objectives as articulated in the scorecard that is embedded in the Construction Sector Black Economic Empowerment Charter. Moreover, the study discusses the strategic changes undergone by each of the firms over a twenty year period (1994-2014) in their efforts to comply with policy, while remaining profitable and sustainable. Additionally, through an evaluation of these corporate strategies and various growth paths, the paper aims to articulate the approaches employed by each company in the face of a reformed political environment, assessing the common tendencies displayed in the industry. The paper consequently seeks to fill in the gaps in literature with regards to the strategies that large companies in the construction industry have gradually adapted in order to continue operating in a democratic South Africa. Thus, through its investigations, it addresses how and why the (1) industry designed and adapted its corporate strategies to fit the institutional arrangements, i.e. B-BBEE, (2), how the industry has responded and implemented BEE, and (3) how the industry has influenced the policy.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 27-30). / This study analyses the determinants of off-farm employment in rural Ethiopia using a representative sample farm households from four regions of the country. Very few previous regional case studies assess the impact of off-farm employment on household food consumption. To fill this gap the study goes on to examine the impact of participation in off-farm employment on household food consumption controlling for possible endogenous treatment selection bias.

Bibliography: pages 217-231. / This thesis basically traces the expansion of commerce in Cape Town with particular reference to company growth from 1835 to 1859. Situated within the field of economic history, the nature of the study is primarily economic, though it attempts to avoid any narrow economic determinism, accepting the basic premise that the most useful method remains an inter-disciplinary approach. The content, however, acknowledges the importance of class in historical interpretation. The commercial bourgeoisie (defined as wholesale merchants, wholesalers-retailers and financiers) thus assumes a central place in discussion here. Yet, inextricably bound up with the history of commerce during the period is the editorial role of John Fairbairn. This connection was immediately apparent, once one began reading Cape Town's leading newspaper, the South African Commercial Advertiser, of which Fairbairn was sole editor between 1835 and 1859. His comments in the paper's editorial columns reveal his intense interest in and his identification with commercial developments. His commercial orientation, whether in debates concerning the advantages of free trade, slave emancipation, the usury law, joint-stock companies or in his reporting of relevant extracts from overseas newspapers, government economic statistics and company reports, led to the coupling in this thesis of the role of John Fairbairn with the history of commerce. Indeed it is the years of Fairbairn's sole editorship which provided one of the most important reasons for the chronological framework employed in the study, viz. 1835-1859. Despite the importance with which historians regard Fairbairn, it is surprising how little his role in the economic sphere has been acknowledged, when considering the vigour of the economic campaigns he conducted in his newspaper.

Bibliography: leaves 225-240. / The study of the development of industry in the bantustans has tended to follow one of two lines, regardless of the methodological persuasion of the writer. The subject is either approached through the analytical prism of a study of industrial decentralisation policy in South Africa or it is mentioned, usually too briefly, in studies of the development of bantustan policy, or of a particular bantustan. For different reasons both roads usually fail to provide a detailed or accurate analysis of the subject. The central problem of the first approach, or, at least of writers who have travelled it thusfar, is that it fails to distinguish, sufficiently, bantustan industrialisation from industrial decentralisation as a general programme. This problem is discussed in some detail in Chapter two. The latter approach, along the path of bantustan analysis, generally fails to analyse bantustan industrialisation in any depth and fails to situate it and thus analyse it as a programme.

An educated population has significant advantages relative to an uneducated one, since education has a high economic and social payoff. However, in the education process, scholars are not in agreement on which factors better explain student achievement. Some argue that school resources are key determinants, whereas other scholars maintain that factors outside the school better predict student achievement. Even within these sentiments, there are arguments on which school-level, classroom-level or student-level variables better explain achievement. Knowledge of such factors is critical, as it helps stakeholders to devise strategies that improve student success. It also helps to maximise budget allocations and at the same time gets the most out of per dollar expenditure. This study has used data from the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ III) to estimate the determinants of student mathematics achievement in three developing countries in Southern Africa; namely, Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

In an industry plagued by underinvestment and unrest, the emergence of the publicly financed MyCiTi Bus Rapid Transit system has structurally altered the market structure of Cape Town road public transport. Due to the heavy dependence of its rollout on subsidised operating support, and the geographies it has targeted, the distribution of subsidy benefits between households in the city has changed. In this context, this investigation looks to address the question: "Is Cape Town's road public transport affordable, and is subsidised operating support well targeted at poor households?" To do so, the paper evaluates the impact of the industry transition on transport affordability and subsidy distribution with the use of a best practice systematic framework. Revealed in the affordability analysis is that Cape Town road public transport remains unaffordable for the lower quartile of the household income distribution - a finding exacerbated by Cape Town's racial economic geographies. On top of this, distribution analysis shows the significant and regressive impact of the industry transition on the distributional consequences of Cape Town road public transport subsidisation. The central premise of this paper is that this evidence warrants the need to investigate alternative subsidy frameworks. Framed by Cape Town's underlying mobility needs and road public transport market structure, this paper designs and simulates the distributional consequences of an alternative subsidy. The simulation reveals that the regressive impact of the transition can be controlled, and the overall distribution improved, by deriving the subsidy framework by a set of demand-side variables. Rather than being viewed as the complete solution, the paper concludes that this simulation signals the need for follow-up research to validate the findings, and to explore the political and operational feasibility of a demand-side subsidy orientation more thoroughly.

This paper presents results from a randomised controlled trial in low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa, to test whether parental messages can increase learner attendance at after-school programmes. Parents who were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups received simple weekly text messages providing them with information about their children's attendance in the previous week. Learners whose parents received text messages attended on average 5.6%-6.1% more after-school sessions than the control group (p<0.01), after controlling for background characteristics and spillover effects. This effect was sustained over the course of the observation period. Structured interviews with parents suggest that those parents who received messages were more likely to engage their children regarding the after-school programme, and were better able to monitor their children's attendance. The intervention cost approximately R1.01 per child per week and has potential for replication. However, good quality data collection systems and regular updates of parent contact information are important for the success of similar interventions. This paper shows that low-cost text messages to poorer parents can increase learners' investment in their education, and shows potential to be scaled up.

Iraq is a country with exceptional natural resource wealth, but also consistent political turbulence manifested by high levels of state corruption, patronage networks, weak governance, poor institutional quality, civil unrest and sectarian conflict, all of which have undermined the sovereignty of its vast petroleum wealth and limited its potential for economic prosperity. As a mechanism for reducing the high levels of corruption and patronage networks as well as stimulating economic activity, this dissertation proposes the use of citizen-based direct distribution of oil revenues and studies the economic impacts of this policy using Social Accounting Matrix analysis. The methodology for this analysis includes testing the policy at different levels of per capita distribution, as well as with three variations in the design of the distribution programs. These variations include a universal cash transfer funded by oil revenue surpluses, a targeted cash transfer funded by oil revenue surpluses and a universal cash transfer funded by the reallocation of funding from the existing food subsidy system. The results illustrate that in each of the scenario variations, cash transfers are shown to have a significant positive impact on household incomes, producing activities and aggregate demand in the economy. The results also illustrate a net welfare gain to households when replacing the existing food subsidy system with cash transfers. In the comparison of distribution variations, targeted programs are shown to have the largest effect on the economy, primarily as lower-income households were allocated a greater proportion of income and subsequently also spend a greater proportion of their income on goods with lower leakages. Higher-income households, who are non-recipients in the targeted programs, benefit from targeted programs through the indirect/induced effects, which are largest in comparison to the other distribution variations. The results also show increased consumption on essential goods &amp; services, primarily agricultural produce, which would ease concerns that cash transfers may generate increased consumption on non-essential/temptation goods.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-93). / This paper examines the predictive power and profitability of an analytically derived, technical trading algorithm in the intraday spot foreign exchange market, using over nine years of hourly data. This trading rule, the reservation price policy (RPP), stems from the computer science literature and, based on certain assumptions, is shown to be efficient under the worst-case scenario criterion. The results indicate the existence of significant information content in the trading rule, which is robust to the parameter choice and consistent across the eleven currencies examined. But, the nonparametric, bootstrap analysis shows that the rule does not capture any incremental information above what is accounted for by the seasonal GARCH(1,1)-MA(1) model.

This study sets out to evaluate the impact of industrial mining on local economies, within a context of a developing country with a strict procurement policy on its extractive industry. It contributes empirical evidence on two main ideas on the impact of mining on local communities. The one idea is that mining has a positive impact on local communities because it creates economic activity through economic linkages with local markets; and thus contributes to local industrialisation, economic development, and poverty reduction. The other idea is that mining harms local economies through negative impacts on the environment; which hurts local agriculture and health, leading to an increase in local poverty. By evaluating a case study of a poor rural economy driven by mining and agriculture, this study measures the net average impact of the opening and expansion of mining on local income poverty. Using ward level data combined with firm data, the study essentially uses a difference-in-differences estimation procedure, by exploiting a local input demand shock from large industrial mines, as well as changes in distance to a mine, as sources of variation. The study finds that the opening of a mine is associated with poverty reduction in surrounding communities, while the impact from an expansion of a mine depends on the type of commodity mined. Unpacking these results by commodity gives insight into the concentration of labour and community unrest in the platinum and gold mining sectors in South Africa. The findings of this study remain robust to different indicators of mine expansion, and checks for alternative explanations such as selective migration and sample checks. The study uses the Limpopo Province of South Africa as a suitable case study.