Land rights in postwar Liberia: The volatile part of the peace process

The end to the war in Liberia, along with quality leadership and a large UN presence has laid the foundation for a successful peace process. Now the delicate part of the process is underway—building viable, equitable, and durable social relations, institutions and legal constructs. A potentially volatile part of any postwar scenario is the inability of land rights institutions to perform in an effective, legitimate, equitable manner. Reform of land tenure via policies, laws, institutions, and capacity, needs to happen in a manner that is able to attend to both the land rights related causes of conflict, and the tangle of land problems brought on by the war itself. This article reports on the current situation in Liberia, and examines the primary set of land tenure problems in the country. The article concludes with a series of suggestions for dealing with the unique circumstances of postwar land tenure, and the Liberian case.     

Poverty Comparisons Over Time and Across Countries in Africa

We use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to compare “poverty” at two or more points in time within and between African countries. Our welfare measure is an index resulting from a factor analysis of various household characteristics, durables, and household heads’ education. An advantage of this measure is that for intertemporal and intraregional comparisons, we need not rely on suspect price deflators and currency conversion factors. The wide availability and similarity of questionnaires of the DHS facilitate comparisons over both time and countries. Our results generally show declines in poverty during the previous decade, largely due to improvements in rural areas.     

Testing the orthodoxies of land degradation policy in Swaziland

This paper explores Swaziland's National Action Programme (NAP) to combat desertification; the country's main strategy for implementing the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). It considers whether this policy tackles real problems supported by micro-level scientific evidence and local experiences, or whether it further reinforces popular orthodoxies about land degradation. Data from one case study chiefdom in Swaziland are used to test two key orthodoxies identified within the country's NAP: (1) the presentation of degradation as a neo-Malthusian problem resulting from population pressure and (2) the assumption that the poor are responsible for degradation of their environment, in particular, the over-use of forest areas and the degradation of soils. It is found that diverse rural livelihoods inherently deliver patches of degradation at the micro-level but it is not necessarily population pressure or poor people that cause the degradation. Households with varying assets simultaneously degrade and conserve different parts of the land resource through pursuing different livelihood activities. The data indicate that while the NAP focuses on mythical problems grounded in the orthodoxies, policy attention is directed away from the more serious land degradation issues affecting rural livelihoods. The findings of this study provide a more nuanced understanding of the gaps between land degradation policy, local conservation practice and environmental and livelihood outcomes, and suggest that policymakers need to evaluate more critically the outdated and simplistic degradation orthodoxies on which much current policy is based. Stronger links need to be made between scientific and policymaking communities, while more credence should be given to land users’ own knowledges, perspectives, concepts and categories surrounding issues of soil conservation and degradation. It is suggested that steps need to be taken towards the development of broadly applicable benchmarks and indicators that bring together local and scientific knowledges across levels. Without this, popularised orthodoxies will continue to provide a basis for inappropriate land policy.     

Corporate governance and incidences of listing suspension by the JSE Securities Exchange of South Africa: An empirical analysis

We examine the association between corporate governance structures and incidences of listing suspension from the JSE Securities Exchange of South Africa. Using a matched-pairs research design, we compare 81 firms suspended between 1999 and 2005 to an equal number of control firms matched in terms of time, size and industry. Employing a conditional logistic model, we find that the likelihood of suspension is higher in firms with a smaller proportion of non-executive directors, without an audit committee, and with greater block-share ownership and higher gearing (i.e. leverage). Further analysis splitting block-share ownership into institutional and non-institutional investors provides mixed results. While we find a positive association between suspension and non-institutional investors, we observe no association with institutional investors. No association is detected for board size, role duality, directors' share ownership, auditor quality and return on assets. Given the paucity of studies examining listing suspension from stock exchanges and corporate governance mechanisms, these findings contribute to the literature. Additionally, the dearth of research on corporate governance in developing countries suggests that our findings have important implications for policy makers in these countries as they endeavor to improve corporate governance.     

Competition and productivity growth in South Africa

This article shows that mark‐ups are significantly higher in South African manufacturing industries than they are in corresponding industries worldwide. We test for the consequences of this low‐level of product market competition on productivity growth. The results of the paper are that high mark‐ups have a large negative impact on productivity growth in South African manufacturing industry. Our results are robust to three different data sources, two alternative measures of productivity growth, and three distinct measures of the mark‐up. Controlling for potential endogeneity of regressors does not eliminate the findings.     

Commentary. Stuck in low GEAR? Macroeconomic policy in South Africa, 1996-98

Despite its ideology while in opposition, once in power theANC government implemented an orthodox macroeconomic policywhich stressed deficit reduction and a tight monetary policy,combined with trade liberalisation. The stated purpose of thispackage (the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution programme,or GEAR) was to increase economic growth, with a 4.2% rate programmedfor 1996-2000. At mid-term of the programme, growth remainedfar below this target. The GEAR's lack of success cannot beexplained by unfavourable external factors; rather, the disappointingperformance seemed the result of fiscal contraction and excessivelyhigh interest rates.