International trade in higher education services is one of the fastest growing tradable service s... more International trade in higher education services is one of the fastest growing tradable service sectors globally. Apart from the positive externalities international students create through knowledge mobility and spill-over, campus diversity, and local community development participation, spending by international students in the host city and immediate surroundings add significantly to local economic growth. The aim of this article is to show, firstly, the relative strong growth of South Africa’s higher education exports vis-à-vis other countries. We also find that South Africa has a strong comparative advantage in exporting higher education services. Secondly, we use a pilot questionnaire conducted in 2009 at Stellenbosch University to estimate the economic impact of these students on the local economy. We find that international students contribute between R159 million and R172 million per semester to the local economy, in addition to the positive – but largely unquantifiable – e...
The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economi... more The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company Act No. 25 of 1892 there was an upsurge in new joint stock companies in the Cape Colony, but little is known about the people who financed them. This study is an enquiry into who they were. Using a list of 6883 shareholders from 263 companies, we show that the Cape's sources of private capital were a diverse group of people. Unlike previous studies, we find that most capital came from the middle class at the Cape and very little from foreign investors. The paper contributes to our understanding of early financial developments on the frontier and the evolution of capitalism at the Cape. It also contributes broadly to the economic and business history of the late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Cape.
Although it seems obvious that tourism flows would be adversely affected by terrorism, crime and ... more Although it seems obvious that tourism flows would be adversely affected by terrorism, crime and corruption, not all the empirical evidence supports this view. This article investigates the extent to which insecurity hurts tourism in Africa. We use a new data set consisting of 187 countries, 38 of which are in Africa, for the period 1995–2017. It combines information on the number of tourist arrivals in African countries with information on three types of security risk – terrorism, crime and corruption. While we find no statistically significant evidence that connects terrorism to tourism globally, we do find an effect for tourists travelling to Africa. Crime, too, hurts tourism, but we find no robust relationship between corruption and tourism. Our results emphasize the importance of government expenditure on safety and security to protect this labour-intensive and pro-poor sector.
Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twe... more Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twentieth-century evolution of military technology that shifted the demand for workers of different stature illustrates the importance of labor demand beyond the commonly discussed influences originating with labor supply. English-born soldiers in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) were taller, on average, than those of World War I (1914–18), yet these differences cannot be attributed to standard of living or business cycle influences on the labor market. Rather, we argue, the mechanization and bureaucratization of warfare increased the relative value of shorter people permitting a decline in the average height of soldiers. Technological change over the period of these two wars affected labor demand in a way that must be recognized before using this evidence to test hypotheses about changes in population health.
To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change o... more To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change of any contemporary society is a challenge. To do this for a pre-industrial society at the southern tip of Africa seems almost impossible. Yet this is the purpose of the Cape of Good Hope Panel, an annual panel data setstill under constructionof Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project is now in its fourth year. Here we describe the history of the project, the transcription process, and present some preliminary results.
In this article, medium-run cycles in wine production in South Africa are extracted and related t... more In this article, medium-run cycles in wine production in South Africa are extracted and related to similar cycles in real GDP per capita during the same period. In addition to removing noise in the historical data, smoothing out short-run fluctuations also eliminates the short-run impact on agricultural production due to idiosyncratic shocks such as weather events, wars, and vine diseases. By isolating the medium-run cycles, it is possible to verify the timing and duration of each cycle, matching it with the historical narrative. In this regard, a 300-year annual data series of South African wine production explains the evolution not only of one of the largest agricultural sectors, but of the South African economy in general. (JEL Classifications: C10, N57, Q10).
Intergenerational mobility studies are now expanding in three directionsincluding different regio... more Intergenerational mobility studies are now expanding in three directionsincluding different regions and time periods, using different outcomes to measure mobility, and investigating the mechanisms that affect mobility. We investigate, for the first time, wealth mobility in the Cape Colony. We compare a number of outcomes, and consider several mechanisms to explain our results. Our data allow us to match at much higher rates than before, and also include daughters. We find very high mobility at the Cape and, in contrast to the existing historiography, higher rates for those at the bottom of the wealth distribution.
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2019
In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census ... more In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787-1828, a dataset of 42 354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84 percent of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.
Safety and security is one of the key concerns when tourists choose their destination. It is ther... more Safety and security is one of the key concerns when tourists choose their destination. It is therefore surprising that, except for a few earlier studies (Albuquerque & McElroy, 1999; Enders & Sandler, 1991; Sönmez & Graefe, 1998), the security of a destination is often overlooked in the traditional tourism demand literature. Recent events related to terrorism and extreme violence in different destinations around the world have, however, shown the importance of safety on inbound tourism. This has resulted in renewed interest in the effect of violent episodes on tourism, including terrorism (
Die konsentrasiekampe van die Anglo-Boereoorlog (1899-1902) wek steeds intense emosies op. Om dié... more Die konsentrasiekampe van die Anglo-Boereoorlog (1899-1902) wek steeds intense emosies op. Om dié rede is dit ook verstaanbaar dat 'n breë literatuur verskeie aspekte van die konsentrasiekampe en die lewe van die bewoners ondersoek. Vreemd genoeg, is een aspek wat wel agterweë gelaat is 'n kwantitatiewe ondersoek na die lengte van verblyf vir die meer as 100 000 wit mans, vroue en kinders in die kampe. Hoeveel dae is die gemiddelde kampbewoner gehuisves? Het bewoners uit die republieke of dié uit die kolonies langer aangebly? En wat was die kenmerke van bewoners wat voor die einde van die oorlog die kampe verlaat het? Duisende het ook in die kampe gesterf. Ons ontleed ook die kenmerke van hierdie groep, en werp lig op die redes vir hul tragiese einde. Deur gebruik te maak van 'n enorme datastel van kampbewoners en die statistiese hulpmiddel oorlewingsanalise, bied hierdie artikel 'n nuwe blik op n ou onderwerp en vra nuwe vrae vir toekomstige historiese navorsing.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2017
Using newly digitised and transcribed attestation records, we provide a detailed description of t... more Using newly digitised and transcribed attestation records, we provide a detailed description of the composition of the South African Constabulary, a volunteer force of mostly English recruits during and after the Second South African War. These records contain personal particulars such as age, country of origin, occupation and religion for 10,399 service terms. We also match these attestation records to the discharge records for each recruit, providing evidence about cause of exit and length of service. The records not only provide a wealth of genealogical data, they also enable us to compare living standards in the various colonies.
The recent surge in computing power and access to data-processing software and online resources e... more The recent surge in computing power and access to data-processing software and online resources enables historians to capture historical statistics on a much larger scale than before. The data revolution—encompassing unprecedented advances in data transcription, augmentation, and collaboration—is especially valuable for studying the history of regions where written records are scarce, such as sub-Saharan Africa. The digitization of large numbers of colonial and postcolonial records offers much promise for a greater understanding of Africa’s economic past.
The #FeesMustFall-campaign's main objection was against the high and rising tuition fees of highe... more The #FeesMustFall-campaign's main objection was against the high and rising tuition fees of higher education in South Africa. This short note investigates this assertion from a historical perspective: Are university fees more expensive than a decade or a century ago? We document historical tuition fees at one of South Africa's premier universities-Stellenbosch University. The answer is an unequivocal yes.
This article highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing compositio... more This article highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing composition of tourist arrivals during and after the event. The change happens because, in the FIFA World Cup, a quota of countries participate from each continent and this opens up new tourism markets. We show that the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa had a smaller growth effect on South Africa’s traditional tourism markets but attracted a large increase from nontraditional ones. However, the size of the effect, we find, is partly due to randomness: It depends on match results in the qualification phase of the tournament. We use a new long-run data set of tourism flows to South Africa and a gravity model for tourism flows and run counterfactual examples of play-off matches during the qualification phase to estimate how much more South Africa could have benefited had larger or richer countries qualified. We conclude that the random results of a few play-off games significantly affect the extent...
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from co... more Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative investigations. Combining household-level settler data with anecdotal accounts of Khoesan labour, this article presents new estimates of the Khoesan population of the Cape Colony. Our results show that the Khoesan did not leave the area as a consequence of settler expansion. On the contrary, the number of Khoesan employed by the settlers increased over time, as the growth of settler farming followed a pattern of primitive accumulation and drove the Khoesan to abandon their pastoral lifestyle to become farm labourers. We show that, in failing to in...
DFG-SFB 1070 ResourceCultures, and Economic Research Southern Africa for background support for d... more DFG-SFB 1070 ResourceCultures, and Economic Research Southern Africa for background support for data collection. An earlier version of this article is available on the ERSA website as working paper no. 270.
Ethnic reunion is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions where their ancestors originate... more Ethnic reunion is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions where their ancestors originate from, while cultural affinity is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions with a shared cultural identity. This paper uses a "world migration matrix", which records the year-1500 origins of the current populations of 159 countries, in a standard tourism gravity equation to provide the first empirical evidence of the existence of both these tourism traits at the global level. Our results remain robust even when controlling for other historical links, such as colonial legacy and regional trade agreements. By controlling for trade flows, we also show that this impact is unique to tourism. Ethnic reunion and cultural affinity are thus important-and neglected-constituents of tourism patterns (and of research), with important policy implications.
International trade in higher education services is one of the fastest growing tradable service s... more International trade in higher education services is one of the fastest growing tradable service sectors globally. Apart from the positive externalities international students create through knowledge mobility and spill-over, campus diversity, and local community development participation, spending by international students in the host city and immediate surroundings add significantly to local economic growth. The aim of this article is to show, firstly, the relative strong growth of South Africa’s higher education exports vis-à-vis other countries. We also find that South Africa has a strong comparative advantage in exporting higher education services. Secondly, we use a pilot questionnaire conducted in 2009 at Stellenbosch University to estimate the economic impact of these students on the local economy. We find that international students contribute between R159 million and R172 million per semester to the local economy, in addition to the positive – but largely unquantifiable – e...
The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economi... more The adoption of limited liability in the nineteenth century is considered to have boosted economic growth and expanded capital markets in Europe and North America. Despite similar legal changes in frontier markets such as South Africa, very few attempts have been made to analyse the economic effects thereof. After the Cape Joint Stock Company Act No. 25 of 1892 there was an upsurge in new joint stock companies in the Cape Colony, but little is known about the people who financed them. This study is an enquiry into who they were. Using a list of 6883 shareholders from 263 companies, we show that the Cape's sources of private capital were a diverse group of people. Unlike previous studies, we find that most capital came from the middle class at the Cape and very little from foreign investors. The paper contributes to our understanding of early financial developments on the frontier and the evolution of capitalism at the Cape. It also contributes broadly to the economic and business history of the late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Cape.
Although it seems obvious that tourism flows would be adversely affected by terrorism, crime and ... more Although it seems obvious that tourism flows would be adversely affected by terrorism, crime and corruption, not all the empirical evidence supports this view. This article investigates the extent to which insecurity hurts tourism in Africa. We use a new data set consisting of 187 countries, 38 of which are in Africa, for the period 1995–2017. It combines information on the number of tourist arrivals in African countries with information on three types of security risk – terrorism, crime and corruption. While we find no statistically significant evidence that connects terrorism to tourism globally, we do find an effect for tourists travelling to Africa. Crime, too, hurts tourism, but we find no robust relationship between corruption and tourism. Our results emphasize the importance of government expenditure on safety and security to protect this labour-intensive and pro-poor sector.
Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twe... more Military enlistment is highly selective for reasons of both labor demand and supply. An early-twentieth-century evolution of military technology that shifted the demand for workers of different stature illustrates the importance of labor demand beyond the commonly discussed influences originating with labor supply. English-born soldiers in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) were taller, on average, than those of World War I (1914–18), yet these differences cannot be attributed to standard of living or business cycle influences on the labor market. Rather, we argue, the mechanization and bureaucratization of warfare increased the relative value of shorter people permitting a decline in the average height of soldiers. Technological change over the period of these two wars affected labor demand in a way that must be recognized before using this evidence to test hypotheses about changes in population health.
To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change o... more To study the intergenerational dynamics of productivity, social mobility and demographic change of any contemporary society is a challenge. To do this for a pre-industrial society at the southern tip of Africa seems almost impossible. Yet this is the purpose of the Cape of Good Hope Panel, an annual panel data setstill under constructionof Cape Colony settler tax records over almost two centuries. The transcription of this ambitious project is now in its fourth year. Here we describe the history of the project, the transcription process, and present some preliminary results.
In this article, medium-run cycles in wine production in South Africa are extracted and related t... more In this article, medium-run cycles in wine production in South Africa are extracted and related to similar cycles in real GDP per capita during the same period. In addition to removing noise in the historical data, smoothing out short-run fluctuations also eliminates the short-run impact on agricultural production due to idiosyncratic shocks such as weather events, wars, and vine diseases. By isolating the medium-run cycles, it is possible to verify the timing and duration of each cycle, matching it with the historical narrative. In this regard, a 300-year annual data series of South African wine production explains the evolution not only of one of the largest agricultural sectors, but of the South African economy in general. (JEL Classifications: C10, N57, Q10).
Intergenerational mobility studies are now expanding in three directionsincluding different regio... more Intergenerational mobility studies are now expanding in three directionsincluding different regions and time periods, using different outcomes to measure mobility, and investigating the mechanisms that affect mobility. We investigate, for the first time, wealth mobility in the Cape Colony. We compare a number of outcomes, and consider several mechanisms to explain our results. Our data allow us to match at much higher rates than before, and also include daughters. We find very high mobility at the Cape and, in contrast to the existing historiography, higher rates for those at the bottom of the wealth distribution.
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2019
In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census ... more In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787-1828, a dataset of 42 354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84 percent of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.
Safety and security is one of the key concerns when tourists choose their destination. It is ther... more Safety and security is one of the key concerns when tourists choose their destination. It is therefore surprising that, except for a few earlier studies (Albuquerque & McElroy, 1999; Enders & Sandler, 1991; Sönmez & Graefe, 1998), the security of a destination is often overlooked in the traditional tourism demand literature. Recent events related to terrorism and extreme violence in different destinations around the world have, however, shown the importance of safety on inbound tourism. This has resulted in renewed interest in the effect of violent episodes on tourism, including terrorism (
Die konsentrasiekampe van die Anglo-Boereoorlog (1899-1902) wek steeds intense emosies op. Om dié... more Die konsentrasiekampe van die Anglo-Boereoorlog (1899-1902) wek steeds intense emosies op. Om dié rede is dit ook verstaanbaar dat 'n breë literatuur verskeie aspekte van die konsentrasiekampe en die lewe van die bewoners ondersoek. Vreemd genoeg, is een aspek wat wel agterweë gelaat is 'n kwantitatiewe ondersoek na die lengte van verblyf vir die meer as 100 000 wit mans, vroue en kinders in die kampe. Hoeveel dae is die gemiddelde kampbewoner gehuisves? Het bewoners uit die republieke of dié uit die kolonies langer aangebly? En wat was die kenmerke van bewoners wat voor die einde van die oorlog die kampe verlaat het? Duisende het ook in die kampe gesterf. Ons ontleed ook die kenmerke van hierdie groep, en werp lig op die redes vir hul tragiese einde. Deur gebruik te maak van 'n enorme datastel van kampbewoners en die statistiese hulpmiddel oorlewingsanalise, bied hierdie artikel 'n nuwe blik op n ou onderwerp en vra nuwe vrae vir toekomstige historiese navorsing.
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2017
Using newly digitised and transcribed attestation records, we provide a detailed description of t... more Using newly digitised and transcribed attestation records, we provide a detailed description of the composition of the South African Constabulary, a volunteer force of mostly English recruits during and after the Second South African War. These records contain personal particulars such as age, country of origin, occupation and religion for 10,399 service terms. We also match these attestation records to the discharge records for each recruit, providing evidence about cause of exit and length of service. The records not only provide a wealth of genealogical data, they also enable us to compare living standards in the various colonies.
The recent surge in computing power and access to data-processing software and online resources e... more The recent surge in computing power and access to data-processing software and online resources enables historians to capture historical statistics on a much larger scale than before. The data revolution—encompassing unprecedented advances in data transcription, augmentation, and collaboration—is especially valuable for studying the history of regions where written records are scarce, such as sub-Saharan Africa. The digitization of large numbers of colonial and postcolonial records offers much promise for a greater understanding of Africa’s economic past.
The #FeesMustFall-campaign's main objection was against the high and rising tuition fees of highe... more The #FeesMustFall-campaign's main objection was against the high and rising tuition fees of higher education in South Africa. This short note investigates this assertion from a historical perspective: Are university fees more expensive than a decade or a century ago? We document historical tuition fees at one of South Africa's premier universities-Stellenbosch University. The answer is an unequivocal yes.
This article highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing compositio... more This article highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing composition of tourist arrivals during and after the event. The change happens because, in the FIFA World Cup, a quota of countries participate from each continent and this opens up new tourism markets. We show that the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa had a smaller growth effect on South Africa’s traditional tourism markets but attracted a large increase from nontraditional ones. However, the size of the effect, we find, is partly due to randomness: It depends on match results in the qualification phase of the tournament. We use a new long-run data set of tourism flows to South Africa and a gravity model for tourism flows and run counterfactual examples of play-off matches during the qualification phase to estimate how much more South Africa could have benefited had larger or richer countries qualified. We conclude that the random results of a few play-off games significantly affect the extent...
Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from co... more Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups in Africa is often missing from colonial records, the presence of such people usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role of the Khoesan in Cape production, despite being frequently acknowledged, has been almost completely ignored in quantitative investigations. Combining household-level settler data with anecdotal accounts of Khoesan labour, this article presents new estimates of the Khoesan population of the Cape Colony. Our results show that the Khoesan did not leave the area as a consequence of settler expansion. On the contrary, the number of Khoesan employed by the settlers increased over time, as the growth of settler farming followed a pattern of primitive accumulation and drove the Khoesan to abandon their pastoral lifestyle to become farm labourers. We show that, in failing to in...
DFG-SFB 1070 ResourceCultures, and Economic Research Southern Africa for background support for d... more DFG-SFB 1070 ResourceCultures, and Economic Research Southern Africa for background support for data collection. An earlier version of this article is available on the ERSA website as working paper no. 270.
Ethnic reunion is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions where their ancestors originate... more Ethnic reunion is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions where their ancestors originate from, while cultural affinity is the propensity of tourists to travel to regions with a shared cultural identity. This paper uses a "world migration matrix", which records the year-1500 origins of the current populations of 159 countries, in a standard tourism gravity equation to provide the first empirical evidence of the existence of both these tourism traits at the global level. Our results remain robust even when controlling for other historical links, such as colonial legacy and regional trade agreements. By controlling for trade flows, we also show that this impact is unique to tourism. Ethnic reunion and cultural affinity are thus important-and neglected-constituents of tourism patterns (and of research), with important policy implications.
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Papers by Johan Fourie