Abstract
The South African agricultural sector went through a period of rapid and extensive deregulation and trade liberalisation starting in the 1980s, coinciding with the democratic transition. Employment in agricultural throughout this period has been shown to follow a steady negative trend, where the level of aggregate employment has declined by nearly half between 1970 and 2014. Using data for the agriculture sector on a number of different variables, the study aimed to determine whether trade liberalisation in agriculture has contributed in any meaningful way to this decline, or whether it is a number of factors in the sector itself as well as the general economic environment that are to blame. Using a Nerlovian modelling framework, where adjustment lags are assumed to play an important role in the dynamic adjustment process, it was found that the variables for trade liberalisation did not totally explain aggregate employment level declines in agriculture. However, trade liberalisation is only part of the story, as other variables are also seen to explain changes in employment. Therefore, changes in the dynamics of employment in South African agriculture between 1989 and 2014 have as much to do with history, uncertainty and preference as they do with changes in input productivity, prices and technology.
M.Com.