Abstract
This study has four objectives: Firstly, it asks whether trade policy reform has contributed to shape South Africa’s internal economic geography. If so, it asks, secondly, if the effect of trade policy reform is beneficial to South Africa’s environment for a given level of her GDP. Thirdly, the work highlights the possibility of nonlinearities and asymmetries in the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in South Africa. Finally, the study provides an empirical assessment of causal relationship between trade and economic growth in South Africa. Therefore, the study comprises four essays, excluding the first and last chapters, which set out the general introduction and conclusions and using the data spanning 1960 to 2016. Each essay is self-contained and a standalone piece of research work. The first essay (Chapter two) explores the role of trade policy reform in shaping the patterns of geographical distribution of manufacturing activities across South Africa’s provinces. The study draws an inference based on the Eicker–White robust covariance Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) which performs well in the presence of heteroscedasticity and data with zero values. The findings suggest that trade openness matters considerably for explaining the industrial patterns across South Africa’s provinces. In particular, industries facing trade liberalisation are most likely to settle in proximity to the metropolitan cities surrounding Gauteng...
Ph.D. (Economics)