South Africa's titanium industrial policy: A product space perspective

South Africa is a globally significant player in the titanium raw mineral production industry but does not play a large role in its downstream mineral processing. Since downstream activities generate much higher value added, the government has sought to support the end-to-end titanium value chain to capture more value from raw titanium before export through ‘beneficiation’-related policies. This paper applies the input–output product space methodology to generate an overview of those sub-sectors within the titanium value chain that are likely to support long-term economic growth in South Africa. We then evaluate whether the selected global value chain activities are supported by the current industrial policy and/or whether a focus on currently excluded global value chain activities is recommended. Our results confirm that although beneficiation appears to make sense in the titanium industry in South Africa, it should (from a product space perspective) be applied neither automatically nor sequentially moving down the value chain. The paper concludes with the shortcomings of the approach and various avenues for future research.     

Plataformas digitales y transformación del trabajo autónomo en la Federación de Rusia: análisis longitudinal a lo largo de un decenio

En este artículo se estudia la evolución del mercado de trabajo en línea en la Federación de Rusia y todo el espacio postsoviético, a partir de datos únicos obtenidos mediante cuatro rondas de encuestas realizadas en 2009, 2011, 2014 y 2019 en la principal plataforma rusófona de trabajo creativo basado en conocimientos. Se observan algunas tendencias importantes: descentralización espacial, diversificación ocupacional, feminización, maduración, aumento del nivel de estudios y desajuste de la calificación, consolidación de la vida profesional autónoma, plataformización y legalización. A la luz de esos resultados, se analizan sus posibles repercusiones en materia de políticas para el futuro desarrollo del trabajo de plataformas en la Federación de Rusia.     

Scope economies from rural and urban microfinance services

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) operate in both rural and urban credit markets and provide financial services to the poor not served by commercial banks. MFIs must keep operating costs low to better serve their clients. We evaluate whether MFIs can lower their costs by exploiting economies of diversification from serving both rural and urban markets rather than specializing in only one. We apply a novel method to estimate scope economies that minimizes the well-known “excessive extrapolation” and accommodates MFIs' heterogeneity. Analyzing panel data on MFIs from 105 countries over 2008–2018, we find that about half of loan-only MFIs benefited from diversification and enjoyed scope economies of 16.6% while over two thirds of savings-and-loan MFIs experienced scope diseconomies of 11.7% suggesting advantages from specialization. Over time, the declining magnitudes and the prevalence of scope (dis)economies in both groups suggest that loan-only MFIs have been able to serve costlier marginal clients while savings-and-loan MFIs have been learning and decreasing their scope diseconomies. Stakeholders encouraging the transformation of MFIs into regulated savings-and-loan institutions that serve both rural and urban markets should be aware of the presence of scope diseconomies for that business type and offer adequate support.