The impact of cash transfers on household welfare in Namibia

Namibia has a long history of providing a universal and non-contributory old age pension, child grants using means testing and quasi-conditionalities, and other cash transfers. Multivariate analysis presented in this paper confirms that these transfers play an important role in alleviating poverty, especially for the very poor. The poverty-reducing effects of the child grants are likely to increase further as access is being rapidly expanded. However, the impact in terms of reducing Namibia's extremely high inequality is limited. The targeting of the cash transfers towards the poorest groups takes place through two main channels. For the child grant, targeting occurs as a result of the orphan status eligibility criteria, as orphans are over-represented in lower-income households. For the universal social pension, it appears that some of the relatively less poor do not receive it even if they are eligible. Means testing of child grants appears ineffective, even without considering administrative costs.     

Corporate social responsibility,mining and sustainable development in Namibia: Critical reflections through a relational lens

For its advocates, corporate social responsibility (CSR) represents a powerful tool through which business and particularly multinationals can play a more direct role in global sustainable development. For its critics, however, CSR rarely goes beyond business as usual, and is often a cover for business practices with negative implications for communities and the environment. This paper explores the relationship between CSR and sustainable development in the context of mining in Namibia. Drawing upon extant literatures on the geographies of responsibility, and referencing in-country empirical case-study research, a critical relational lens is applied to consider their interaction both historically and in the present.     

Estimating national economic parameters for Namibia using the shadow pricing approach

This paper estimates national economic parameters to be used for project appraisal in Namibia. The shadow prices of capital, labour, and foreign exchange are derived. The results suggest that the economic opportunity cost of capital is 7.2%. The economic costs of Namibian labour as a share of financial costs are 32% for urban semi-skilled and unskilled labour, and 54% for rural semi-skilled and unskilled labour. The economic costs of foreign labour as a share of financial costs are 59%. The shadow exchange rate factor is estimated to be 4% for the Namibian economy.     

Foreign direct investment,exports and economic growth: ADRL and causality analysis for South Africa

The article empirically investigated economic growth as a function of foreign direct investment and exports in South Africa. The article applied the autoregressive distributed lag model, known as the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration for the long run relationship between economic growth, foreign direct investment and exports. The error correction model was used to examine the short run dynamics; and the VECM Granger causality approach was used to investigate the direction of causality. The article confirmed cointegration between economic growth, foreign direct investment and exports. The article indicates that both foreign direct investment and exports spur economic growth contrary to some studies, which found that FDI does not cause economic growth. The VECM Granger causality analysis found unidirectional causality between economic growth and foreign direct investment running from foreign direct investment to economic growth, unidirectional causality between foreign direct investment and exports running from foreign direct investment to exports and bidirectional causality between economic growth and exports. The article confirms the FDI-led growth hypothesis for South Africa. On the policy front, the government could stimulate foreign direct investment through incentives to investors, creation of a good macroeconomic environment and a careful utilisation of loose monetary policy to grow the economy.     

Assessing urban growth and rural land use transformations in a cross-border situation in Northern Namibia and Southern Angola

The Okavango catchment is a hot spot of accelerating land use change. In particular, climate predictions, demographic developments and a growing utilization of ecosystem services and functions are expected to increase pressure on resources and land. Land use conflicts, the sustenance of precarious livelihoods, deforestation of woodland savannahs, upstream–downstream water issues and human–wildlife conflicts are among the processes that are characteristic of policy and management challenges in the region. In the Eastern and Western Kavango regions of Namibia and the Cuando-Cubango province of Angola, a unique cross-border situation exists that allows assessing how the combination of local traditions, regional land management and national policies determines spatial patterns of land use and land cover transformation processes.To map major land use types and change processes we used a set of multi-temporal Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-7 ETM+ data sets, support vector machine (SVM) classification and iterative spectral mixture analysis (ISMA) on images covering the period from 1990 to 2010. Integrating satellite imagery with literature reviews, interviews, census and household survey data, we assessed the contrasting development of resource utilization on both sides of the Okavango River. We investigated if and how policies and regulations at different levels drive land use decisions, and how these decisions manifest spatially.We found a strong and interconnected urban growth on both sides of the river. The area around Rundu has constantly been evolving to become Namibia's second largest city, also functioning as a hub of development and transborder commerce with opposing Calai. This trend was found to affect adjacent settlement areas and cause widespread conversion of woodland savannahs to agricultural land or their utilization for timber extraction. The conversion of woodland savannah to arable land was by far the dominant land use change process on both sides of the river, with a total conversion area of 460 km² (Namibia) and 293 km² (Angola) observed during the observation period. Strong spatial change gradients occurred in relation to determining factors, such as accessibility, proximity to water, urban centres, etc., while relations to settlements where less obvious. Assessing results by country illustrated the difference in land use intensity and resource consumption between Angola and Namibia, which relate directly to historical developments, with a long period of stability in Namibia standing opposed to the recent and ongoing recovery from civil war in Angola. These are added to by statutory and traditional policy frameworks, the national endowment with natural capital (e.g. oil, uranium, diamonds, zinc) and the integration into global markets, which strongly affects national economies of both countries at large.Underlying land use decisions were found to be largely driven by individualized perspectives on growth ideologies, consumerism and wealth-aspirations connected to globalization processes. However, at present the result of these perspectives is still mainly a small-structured conversion to rainfed agriculture as a component of subsistence strategies of local livelihoods, and thus stands opposed to other regions of the world, where change processes are much more driven by large companies or follow national regulations and result in more intensive uses.     

Robust Estimates of Changes in Poverty and Inequality in Post‐Independence Namibia

We estimate changes in the distribution of household consumption expenditure in Namibia since independence in 1990 and the effects on poverty. To produce comparability between two household surveys, we use survey‐matching techniques, and we apply the framework of stochastic dominance to test the robustness of our results. The results reveal a significant decrease in the poverty headcount over the period and small but insignificant decreases in the country's extremely high levels of inequality. Decomposition analysis shows that poverty reduction in Namibia is largely driven by growth in mean incomes rather than redistribution. Even so, there have been important changes in inequality among different social groups especially as educational attainment has replaced ethnicity as the main determinant of between‐group inequality.     

Are urban land tenure regulations in Namibia the solution or the problem?

Land tenure in Namibia is regulated by a variety of Acts, some of which date back to as far as 1937, and some of which are yet to be approved by Cabinet. This variety of Acts makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of land administration as a whole, and the appropriateness of coercive instruments with regards to urban land tenure in particular. In this article we evaluate how urban land tenure regularization practices are conducted in Namibia, and to compare new formal procedures, designed to address problems of efficiency and efficacy, to older existing procedures, supposedly not efficient or effective. This evaluation uses a theoretical framework of Pritchett and Woolcock [Pritchett, L., Woolcock, M., 2004. Solutions when the solution is the problem: arraying the disarray in development. World Development 32 (2), 191–212], which deals with public service delivery and transaction-intensive services. Applying this framework for a comparative analysis of 5 different land subdivision practices – each relying on a different land-related act – we conclude that the degree of regulation and regularization is perhaps not so much a solution for urban land tenure problems but more of a problem in itself.     

Wealth,Natural Capital,and Sustainable Development: Contrasting Examples from Botswana and Namibia

Theoretical work has demonstrated that sustainable development requires non-declining per capita wealth, where wealth is defined to include produced, natural, human and social capital. Several studies have attempted to measure total national wealth or changes in wealth, but have been seriously hampered by a lack of data, especially for natural and human capital. To address this problem, the UN and other international statistical agencies developed a standardized framework for environmental accounts, the System of integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA). Using the newly available asset accounts for natural capital, national wealth accounts are constructed and used to assess the contrasting development paths of Botswana and Namibia. Botswana, with an explicit policy of reinvestment of resource rents, has roughly tripled per capita wealth and national income over the past two decades. Namibia, with no explicit policy to use natural capita to build wealth, has seen per capita wealth and income decline.     

An analysis of risk factors associated with road crash severities in Namibia

Abstract

Road crash is a leading cause of death and disabilities in Namibia and other developing countries. Based on recent trends, the World Health Organization indicated that progress to realize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.6 – which calls for a 50% reduction in the number of road traffic deaths by 2020 – remains far from sufficient. To contribute to efforts in reducing road fatalities in Namibia, this study examined risk factors associated with the severity of crashes recorded in the country. Mixed logit modelling methodology was adopted to address the problem of unobserved heterogeneity in injury severity analysis. Model estimation results reveal that collision with pedestrians, head-on collisions, ran-off road collisions and crashes involving high occupancy passenger vehicles were more likely to result in fatalities and severe injuries. The findings and recommendations of this study are expected to enhance countermeasure implementation to reduce road crashes in Namibia.     

The Mystery of Missing Real Spillovers in Southern Africa: Some Facts and Possible Explanations

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the economies of South Africa and its neighbours (Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe) are tightly integrated with each other. The multiple interconnections suggest that South Africa's GDP growth rate should affect positively its neighbours'. However, our review of the available econometric evidence and our panel growth regressions suggest that there is no strong evidence of real spillovers in the region after 1994, once global shocks are controlled for. More generally, we find no evidence of real spillovers from South Africa to the rest of the continent post‐1994. We investigate the possible reasons for this lack of spillovers. Most importantly, the economies of South Africa and the rest of Sub‐Saharan Africa might have decoupled in the mid‐1990s. That is when international sanctions on South Africa ended and the country re‐integrated with the global economy, while growth in the rest of the continent accelerated due to a combination of domestic and external factors.