Did the apartheid economy ‘fail’?

Abstract

It is often claimed — by analysts right across the political spectrum — that the apartheid economy grew ‘exceptionally rapidly’ until the early 1970s. Rarely, however, is evidence provided to back up this claim, which forms the focus of this article. Four practical growth criteria are proposed by which to evaluate whether the post‐war South African economy grew as fast as its considerable potential would suggest. It is found that the apartheid economy did not surge forward after 1948, as did other developing economies, its comparative output and productivity growth record is poor according to a range of measures, and its share of world and developing country manufactured exports fell steadily from 1955 to 1985, suggesting that such exports were not used to stimulate economic growth. It thus seems that the apartheid economy grew curiously slowly and can be said to have ‘failed’ — partly because the apartheid superstructure impeded economic development, and partly because of the constraining effects of a range of shortsighted and ill‐directed state economic policies. More careful and systematic state economic interventions may be required to help the economy grow more rapidly and efficiently in the future, implying an urgent need for empirical research on state economic policies and their effects in South Africa.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 113 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.