This special issue of the Journal is devoted to an invited set of contributions from various academics in South Africa and deals with selected aspects of economic transformation since political democratization took place in 1994. The contributions have a broad theme dealing with the manifold intricacies and difยฎculties of economic transformation in a country that had followed a historically-distorted growth trajectory, inยฏuenced by over 50 years of apartheid, and that on ยฎnally achieving a negotiated political democratization found itself thrust into a dramatically changed world global environment in the 1990s.
The ยฎrst article represents a contribution by Fedderke dealing with the broad theme of how democratic transition can aid or abet human development. Critically examining some of the expansive literature on growth and institutions as well as numerous substantive attempts to model the interrelationship, Fedderke's argument suggests that much of this theory and modelling is suspect because of the level of generalization. The new growth literature neglects issues such as the efยฎciency of various institutions involved in the growth process. Furthermore this theory disregards prevalent ambiguities in the relationship between growth and institutional change, nor does it suggest what requisite policy interventions are optimal in achieving a successful outcome. The paper concludes that the general theory relating institutions and growth could be substantially enhanced ยฑ as in South Africa's case ยฑ with a detailed, speciยฎc, longitudinal analysis (undertaken by the author) that adequately captures the structural milieu impacting on the uniqueness of the experience for a country such as South Africa.
The Liebbrandt and Woolard contribution examines the trends and existing evidence on household inequality in South Africa and develops some new evidence on `income mobility'. While, historically, the racially-rigged labour market in South Africa had always been assumed to operate as the fundamental explanation for inequality, a more thoroughgoing decomposition of the linkage (with the authors using panel-data analysis) reveals that the contribution of wage income tends to be uneven across different levels of aggregation as well as time. Not only (as the authors convincingly argue) is income inequality a function of historically-determined wage variation ยฑ the direct result of apartheid ยฑ but throughout the more recent period appears also linked to labour market