MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4410195293 · doi:10.1016/j.exis.2025.101678

Is South Africa afflicted by the resource curse?

2025· article· en· W4410195293 on OpenAlex
Ross Harvey

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Extractive Industries and Society · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicNatural Resources and Economic Development
Canadian institutionsInstitute on Governance
Fundersnot available
KeywordsResource curseCurseResource (disambiguation)Development economicsPolitical scienceBusinessNatural resource economicsNatural resourceEconomicsSociologyComputer scienceLawAnthropology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

• South Africa may be afflicted by Dutch Disease; we present quantitative evidence that supports this hypothesis, at least in part. • If this diagnosis is correct, then it follows that certain key policy recommendations be followed, such as urgent economic diversification, political reform and financial transparency improvements. • While South Africa is not, according to our quantitative examination, afflicted by other dimensions of the resource curse per se, institutional quality appears to have been impaired by mineral rents, which will ultimately reverse the country’s human development gains if not immediately reversed. • This is the first quantitative attempt to specifically assess the role of South Africa’s mineral rents in its manufacturing and development outcomes against a set of comparable countries from 1996 to 2019. The results are, therefore, novel, and should be closely scrutinised by policymakers and academics alike. This paper addresses the question of how best to explain South Africa's prolonged economic stagnation, manifest especially in manufacturing decline, both in total employment share and value addition to the economy. Despite its wealth of natural resources, South Africa's economic performance – especially in the manufacturing sector – has been weak, especially since 2008. The extent to which the country's resource abundance determines manufacturing performance has largely been overlooked in the literature. Utilising analytic narrative, we examine the plausibility of competing hypotheses that may account for manufacturing decline in South Africa. Our primary hypothesis is that South Africa is afflicted by a particular manifestation of the resource curse known as “Dutch Disease”. After examining several explanatory hypotheses, we conclude that the decline of South Africa's manufacturing industry is strongly linked to its reliance on mineral rents, but through multiple channels. The decline is exacerbated by poor institutional quality, itself driven by "state capture," hindering the country's ability to combat corruption and inefficiencies in government effectiveness. To recover from these dynamics, we suggest that South Africa should focus on strengthening institutions, improving political governance, and enhancing financial transparency. Addressing these challenges is crucial to manufacturing recovery, diversifying the economy and fostering broad-based economic development in South Africa.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.203
Threshold uncertainty score0.535

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.190 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it