Japanese aid to Africa: Patterns,motivation and the role of structural adjustment

This article presents estimates of capital flight from 25 low-income sub-Saharan African countries in the period 1970 to 1996. Capital flight totaled more than $193 billion (in 1996 dollars); with imputed interest earnings, the accumulated stock of flight capital amounts to $285 billion. The combined external debt of these countries stood at $178 billion in 1996. Taking capital flight as a measure of private external assets, and calculating net external assets as private external assets minus public external debts, sub-Saharan Africa thus appears to be a net creditor vis-à-vis the rest of the world.     

The politics of anti-corruption enforcement in South Africa

The criminalisation of corruption recognises that the misuse of official office for private gain exacts a detrimental and distorting effect on a country's social and economic development. This is especially acute in countries undergoing rapid political system transitions. In an effort to combat corruption, governments have come under increasing pressure to enhance the monitoring and oversight of public institutions through stringent intra and inter-institutional checks. In South Africa, the evidence clearly shows that concrete and incremental steps have been introduced since the country's democratic transition to regulate malfeasance in the public sector through heightened monitoring, prevention, investigation and prosecution measures. Despite these measures, intra and inter-institutional analysis of anti-corruption enforcement indicates that the integrity of this approach, informed by principle-agent accountability arrangements, can be compromised or side-lined by collective action efforts that undermine the effectiveness of anti-corruption mechanisms. This reflects a politicisation of anti-corruption enforcement.     

Rebuilding the DRC

The DRC's transitional parliamentary system, run by appointed officials, is still in place pending the country's first elections. The system is characterised by personal considerations overriding those of the electorate and a disregard for the strengthening of democracy.     

The 1999 Kosovo war through a South African lens

The time has come for ineffective and partisan regional intervention in the worsening tragedy in Zimbabwe to be replaced by an international initiative through the United Nations.     

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South Africa's status and prestige as a country that successfully and unilaterally disarmed its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme enabled it to engage with the Saddam government of Iraq in the months leading up to the US-led invasion of March 2003. Following intense international diplomatic efforts, Saddam Hussein had agreed to allow UN and International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspectors to enter Iraq in November 2002. Acting outside the UN Security Council, the US and its coalition partners maintained that Iraq continued to maintain and produce WMD, a claim refuted by weapons inspectors, including a South African disarmament team that visited Iraq in February 2003. Employing three diplomatic strategies associated with niche diplomacy, South Africa contributed to attempts to avert the invasion by assisting with the orderly disarmament of Saddam-led Iraq and by practising multilateralism. These strategies, notwithstanding the US-led invasion signalling a failure of South Africa's niche diplomacy in this instance, provide valuable insight into the nuclear diplomacy of South Africa.     

Russia,NMD and the ABM treaty: The dangers of American unilateralism

In order to consolidate its strategic bilateral relations developed in Africa over the past 14 years, South Africa must choose five key ‘hubs’ (regional powers) in each of Africa's five sub-regions. In addition, South Africa should pick two additional ‘spokes’ (influential actors) in each sub-region. These 15 strategic partners can increase South Africa's engagement on the continent in the areas of diplomacy, conflict management, and trade relations. South Africa's bilateral relations would thus resemble a gigantic bicycle, with five hubs and ten spokes. The five hubs are Mozambique, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, and Algeria. The ten spokes would be Zimbabwe, Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Sudan, Tanzania, Egypt and Libya. It is around these countries that South Africa can build solid strategic bilateral relationships in Africa.     

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South Africa's contemporary foreign policy cannot be understood outside an explanation of its post-apartheid political transition. Its actors, the ideas they express, the interests they represent and the institutions they craft are all crucially influenced and impacted upon by the democratic transition and how it has evolved. This democratic transition is defined by two foundational characteristics. First, as one of the last of the ‘anti-colonial’ transitions led by an African nationalist leadership, it is driven with a focus on achieving racial equality in both the domestic and global context. Second, the transition has occurred when a particular configuration of power prevailed in the global order that not only established the parameters which governed its evolution, but also determined which interests prevailed within it. The former's imprint on the foreign policy agenda is manifested in South Africa's prioritisation of Africa, its almost messianic zeal to modernise the continent through a focus on political stability and economic growth, and its desire to reform the global order so as to create an enabling environment for African development. It is also reflected in South Africa's insistence not to be seen to be dictated to by the West, especially in the fashioning of its economic policies and its approach to addressing the Zimbabwean question. The latter manifests itself not only in how corporate interests take centre stage in South Africa's foreign policy interactions, but also in how transnational alliances like India–Brazil–South Africa (IBSA) are being fashioned to challenge big powers and their interests in global forums and in the international system. These thematic concerns are the subject of investigation in this paper.     

SADC and the GCC: Shared regional challenges and potential links

This article assesses the prospects for a clearly articulated economic diplomacy approach in South Africa's foreign policy. It argues that while South Africa's foreign policy has been to a considerable extent normatively grounded, it has failed to develop a coherent economic diplomacy that is based on focused and distinctly expressed priorities. This is a crucial gap that limits the country's ability to respond to regional and global changes, in particular those posed by emerging powers. The article identifies a number of gaps in South Africa's foreign policy approach and highlights its oblivion to global developments and geopolitical dynamics in the African continent. It sets out possible policy outlines for developing a clearer and stronger economic diplomacy. The building blocks for such an approach include the identification of strategic foreign policy priorities; greater institutional co-operation among agencies dealing with economic and foreign policy development; synergies between corporate strategies and government's foreign policy objectives; and the need for South Africa to develop a stronger leadership ambition in the African continent, both to contribute to Africa's development and to pursue its own economic interests. This ambition will require awareness of South Africa's own limitations, thus focusing the better part of its foreign policy on a limited set of countries that match strategic priorities.     

Participation of African member states in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) multilateral trading system

Abstract

The core purpose and goals of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are to enhance growth by allowing each country to trade freely according to its comparative advantage. The other stated main objectives of the WTO are: raising standards of living; providing full employment; reduction of tariffs and non‐tariff barriers; and the elimination of discriminatory treatment. According to the current orthodox economic view, trade openness is essential for growth: countries that liberalise their imports and orientate production towards exports are assumed to have faster growth than those that do not, and the faster the rate of opening, the greater will the prospect be for development. The emphasis on trade liberalisation and export orientation in the past ten years following the adoption of the Uruguay Round has led to phenomenal growth in world merchandise trade, which has grown consistently faster than output. The orthodox view approach is today expanded and modified with the view that liberalisation measures are not sufficient by themselves and should be accompanied by other factors such as sound macroeconomic policies, good governance and a modern infrastructure. Africa's dependence on primary commodities as a source of export earnings has meant that it is vulnerable to weather conditions, market vagaries, and price volatility, arising mainly from supply shock and the secular decline in real commodity prices. The attendant terms of trade losses have exacted heavy costs in terms of incomes, indebtedness, investment, poverty and development. Therefore, the basic approach that liberalisation has a direct link to economic growth and should be undertaken as fast as possible is being questioned and has been challenged by empirical studies in recent years. The relevant studies have shown that there is a lack of relationship between the degree of trade liberalisation and the rate of growth. The emerging paradigm accepts that there are possible costs, as well as potential benefits of trade liberalisation to a particular developing country, depending on the conditions in that country, and the type of liberalisation undertaken. The other impediments and weaknesses identified as affecting effective, efficient and economical participation of African members in the WTO include rapid liberalisation as potential source of fiscal instability; general absence of peace, security and democracy; globalisation and lack of competitive ability; supply‐side constraints; high export concentration ratio; problems of implementation; exclusion and/or marginalisation from knowledge‐based economy; and lack of capacity. The Doha Development Round was initiated to attend to, and address, these problems, and it is still too early to predict the outcome. African countries need to look for African solutions to their socio‐economic and political problems, adopting transdisciplinary approaches in the context of the African Renaissance paradigm.     

The Structure of Government Intervention in African Agriculture

This article examines the determinants of various rates of agricultural subsidies (output, input, exchange rate distortions, and aggregate) using commodity-level data from eight African countries in the 1980s. Econometric results indicate that structural adjustment policies were more effective in reforming exchange rate distortions than in liberalising commodity markets. Output policies are determined within the national context while input subsidies are more responsive to commodity-specific conditions. Further-more, agricultural subsidies were strongly influenced by the degree of urbanisation and by the number of people per unit of arable land in a manner consistent with cheap food policy strategies.