Gold and South Africa's Great Depression

Barry Eichengreen

No 15812, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: South Africa was one of the fastest growing economies of the 1930s. This paper seeks to identify the roots of this macroeconomic outperformance and reconcile it with the country’s delayed departure from the gold standard, such departure having typically been the event inaugurating recovery from the slump. It emphasizes South Africa’s dependence on gold production, which gave the economy an additional boost from currency depreciation, over and above that felt in other countries, when depreciation finally took place. This highlights the paradox of South African policy makers’ resistance to currency depreciation, as epitomized by the report of the Select Committee on the Gold Standard in 1932.

Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15812 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Gold and South Africa’s Great Depression (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15812

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15812

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().