The systematic failure of post-settlement support in South African land reform has been identified as a major contributing variable to the approximated 50 percent failure rate  of new land reform projects.  In spite of this dismal record, government increasingly finds itself under immense political pressure to speed up land reform efforts in order to meet preconceived reform targets,  and have embarked on the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy (PLAS) for this purpose. It therefore becomes imperative that post-settlement support be prioritized if the failure rate of land reform is to be reversed. Without systematic and comprehensive post transfer support it is highly unlikely that most land reform projects will succeed in improving the quality of life of participants and make significant contributions towards transformation in rural South Africa.
Sharing the concerns of many key stakeholders in the Land Reform programme, The Rural Action Committee of Mpumalanga (TRAC-MP) launched the Mpumalanga Management and Mentorship Pilot Programme (MMMPP) in January 2003. By working on six diverse land reform projects, the MMMPP sought to develop experience and lessons in post transfer support strategies that could be shared with policy makers and shareholders to develop appropriate policies and programmes. Staff working on the MMMPP made significant inputs on the Mentorship Policy approved by the National Department of Agriculture in support of their Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme (CASP) in 2005.
In 2006, TRAC-MP embarked on the “Mentorship Lead Programme” with the aim of strengthening the ability of the Provincial Department of Agriculture to provide the necessary support to land reform projects during their post-transfer phase. This project can be seen as bridging the gap between policy at a national level and implementation support at a Provincial level. Therefore it is envisaged that the Mentorship Lead Programme will significantly contribute towards the ability of the Provincial Department of Agriculture to provide the range and depth of support activities necessary to ensure that land reform projects indeed have a positive impact on the transformation objective in rurual Mpumalanga and South Africa as a whole.
The Mpumalanga Department of Agriculture and Land Administration has since entered into an agreement with TRAC-MP in connection with the Mentorship Lead Programme, where  both parties have agreed to work together in order to plan and develop an effective and comprehensive post-settlement support structure aimed at land reform projects with commercial farming objectives through the Mentorship Lead Programme.  By incorporating research done and lessons learned during the MMMPP project, and by focussing on roughly 24 land reform cases in Mpumalanga, The Mentorship Lead Programme aims to develop a model and system for post-settlement support that could eventually be extended throughout the province and hopefully act as a useful point of departure for future national and provincial policy on this subject.
It was through TRAC-MP's experience with the MMMPP project that two high-priory constraints were identified to post-settlement success, namely problems related to market access as well as problems with securing production capital.  With the initiation of the Mentorship Lead Programme, TRAC-MP therefore approached the Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) to co-undertake strategic research on these constraints in order to formulate strategic recommendations that could be incorporated into the Mentorship Lead Programme.

South Africa has a peculiar industrial structure given its factor endowments:

production is capital intensive in sectors and concentrated in capital intensive sectors despite an abundance of unskilled labour. Part of the reason for this phenomenon lies in the development process of South African industry: it grew around the mining sector and its core sectors remain close to the minerals endowment up until today.
A possible explanation for this path dependent development is the existence of forward and backward linkages between sectors that drive
industrial development. We use an SVAR approach with realistic identification assumptions from input-output relations 'following a paper by
Abeysinghe and Forbes (2005)' to estimate the effect of linkages between sectors on sectoral growth performance.

The drive towards SADC trade liberalisation is a goal that is emphasised in most documents of the SADC Secretariat, including the protocol on trade and the regional indicative strategic development plan (RISDP). This trade liberalisation aims to deepen regional integration through increased intra-trade between SADC member states, which was to be facilitated by the removal of trade barriers. Up to so far, the only barriers that have noticeably been reduced are import tariffs. At the same time individual member states are required to meet the growing challenges of global and regional competitiveness. The trade profile of an average SADC member country is characterised by high reliance on few products for trade revenue, which also contribute enormously to the value of total trade, and also has most prospects of industrial development. Therefore, the need for competitiveness is dependent upon the ability to protect the very same sectors that are being liberalised.

The initial steps of trade liberalisation in the region involved reduction of tariffs under the implementation of the protocol on trade, however the expected response from trade was low. It is a well known fact that there exist other weaknesses in these economies such lack of productive capacities to respond to trade incentives and infrastructural constraints which restrain potential trade. This study examines the extent to which trade protection under regional integration processes of developing countries affects the least developing members of the bloc. The static comparative tariff analysis method of relative tariff ratio is applied to determine the degree of protection between members of SADC. The results show that the least developing members of the bloc grant more access to the developing members, and they also face the most restrictive protection in the counterpart markets. Furthermore, the potential for the least developing members to build up their industrial capacity is negatively affected by deeper integration as they rely on trade instruments.

The trend towards the Regulatory State.

It has been argued that:

'A fundamental driver of the demand for regulation in recent years has been increasing 'risk aversion' in many spheres of life. Regulation has come to be seen as a panacea for many of society's ills and as a means of protecting people from inherent risks of daily life. Any adverse event is laid at government's door for a regulatory fix. (Banks, 2006, p. 11)

South Africa is in its infancy regarding independent economic regulation of network utilities. Although economic regulation of public utilities have been exercised in South Africa for a number of years (usually by the line Government Department), the establishment of independent economic regulation had only emerged a little more than ten years ago.
Changes are already occurring in the regulatory scene with more independent regulatory entities developing, e.g. moving away from an electricity regulator to an independent energy regulator, the development of a ports regulator and changes in the regulation of telecommunications. There has been a move to more convergence for certain sectors. Overall, regulators have however developed pretty much in silos.
The purpose of this paper is to re-establish the rationale and principles of sound economic regulation of network industries and to highlight the importance of some principles, for example political independence. It will also provide a brief overview of the differences in terms of regulatory principles among current economic regulators in South Africa.

This paper examines the volatility spillovers between the South African currency and the currencies of selected markets in developed and emerging Europe as well as Asia and Latin America. Additionally, the exchange rate volatility spillovers are examined over one year window samples to determine the evolution of volatility spillovers between these currencies overtime. The empirical results show statistically significant negative exchange rate volatility spillover effects between the South African currency and the currencies in developed and emerging European markets, while no spillover effects can be established for the currencies in the Asian and Latin American markets.
Moreover, the one year window samples results confirm the hypothesis of changing exchange rate volatility spillovers across currency markets overtime.

The South Africa that emerged from the 1994 democratic elections was one characterised by widespread poverty and inequality with an economy that was suffering the effects of macro-economic mismanagement.  The root causes of these problems were seen to have originated from within the distorted policies of a highly centralised apartheid state. Under these circumstances, combined with the recognition that the new post-apartheid provincial and local spheres of government were still finding their feet, nascent national economic policy frameworks did little to diagnose spatially differentiated elements that might have added some geographic sensitivity to their programmes.  This was true for how policies responded to spatial differentiation with areas of significant economic activity, as well as in relation to zones of exploited underdevelopment that had been at the core of the Bantustan system.  However, the launch of the DTI's Spatial Development Initiatives (SDI) in 1997 heralded something of a shift in thinking towards some measure of recognition of the benefit of more spatially differentiated national policies and programmes.  This brief paper seeks to explore the manner in which subsequent policies and programmes – emerging primarily from the Department of Trade and Industry – responded to matters of spatial differentiation.  The paper finds a lack of any serious engagement in such policy frameworks and programmes and makes some suggestions as to why this might be problematic and how possible responses could be conceived of.

The South African government has begun to speed up the delivery of infrastructure. This policy shift is in line with its aim to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014, achievable if the economy grows at an average rate of 6 per cent by 2010. The government was able to demonstrate advances across many fronts at the end of the first decade of democracy. Macro economic conditions had stabilised and the economy was growing. In the socioeconomic arena, basic services were more widely accessible and poverty rates were marginally down. However, the Ten Year Reviewi, published by the Presidency, pointed to a series of crucial challenges to the further improvement of sustained economic growth performance and the elimination of poverty and reduction of inequality. These challenges were acknowledged in the 2005 State of the Nation Addressii, in which the President urged the nation to work to achieve the ambitious goals set out for the next decade: that is, to halve poverty and unemployment by 2014 and raise economic growth to an average of 6 per cent by 2010.

In February 2006, the Deputy President launched the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa)iii to address these challenges and opportunities. This initiative incorporates the imperative of speeding up delivery and economic growth, and making sure that the more rapid and equitable distribution of opportunities and benefits is promoted and supported. This paper, an extract from the DBSA's 2008 Infrastructure Barometer, will explore exactly this relationship , between infrastructure investment and its impact on both economic growth and development.

In the current three-year budget cycleiv, the South African national Treasury has allocated R568 billion to infrastructure development and maintenance, broadly defined. This follows the period between 1976 to 2002, when annual infrastructure investment fell from 8.1 per cent to 2.6 per cent of GDP, and per capita expenditure from R1 268 to R356.v While it is known at a macro- level, in aggregate terms, what the level of infrastructure investment is and should be, there needs also to be an understanding of the likely impacts and implications of disaggregated sectoral infrastructure investment, where and for whom and under what conditions.

At the macro-level, the acceleration envisaged in AsgiSA sets an earlier date for planned future investment, significantly increasing the total amount available for investment in infrastructure. It is generally anticipated that this will also bring forward the benefits to be gained from such investment. However, although accelerated (increased) spending generally will increase the rate of growth, its impact on reducing poverty and unemployment is not as clear. These outcomes require an understanding of the pattern of spending in terms of sectors and value chains as well as location. Thus, although the economic growth and aggregate poverty and inequality situation might be improved at macro level, at the micro level, where benefits are experienced, the picture may be very different.

In order to test the impact of accelerated infrastructure investment on the South African economy, and specifically on the macro-economic, poverty and distribution performance of the economy, a linked macro-micro economic model of South Africa was developed. The findings and implications of this model will form the basis of the paper.

The making of a 'new' South Africa has not been without its challenges. After the political miracle of 1994, political actors, policy-makers and academics had to transform repressive and apartheid predatory political machinery into a functional and inclusive and democratised polity. Inebriated by the euphoria of a newly found democracy, the political architects succeeded in creating a constitution based on the principles of non-racialism, non-sexism and equal rights. What also defined that politically action-packed dispensation was the crafting of a tri-spherical government system , an institutional/administrative structure that was neither centralist nor federal in nature Crafted in a miasmic and delicate political setting, the South African 'quasi-federal' institutional machinery was indeed a product of its time. The constitutional push for 'distinctive yet interdependent' spheres of government for instance, is indicative of the prevailing psychical and the projected spatial reconfiguration of space as well as those laying the boulders for a new South African state.

This paper attempts to explore the possibilities of promoting regional planning in a South African context where the battle for scalar supremacy continues to define the development planning agenda. Some questions posed here include the following: how can one define a region and regional planning in South Africa? Are provinces and/or districts well-geared and capacitated to tackle the country's developmental challenges in a regionally-oriented manner? Does South Africa need a 'new' regional development agency that can be mandated with defining and executing the country's regional development planning agenda? In attempting to answer the above, the first part will explore the genesis of provinces in South Africa, at the same time highlighting the emerging role of districts in promoting development planning in South Africa. The second part will then give a brief overview of regional planning from a new regionalist perspective, laying a foundation for a mark-out of the current state of planning tools at provincial and district level, within the context of intergovernmental planning. The third part will then