The Impact of the 2014 Platinum Mining Strike in South Africa: An Economy-Wide Analysis

Heinrich Bohlmann (), Petor Dixon, Maureen Rimmer and Jan Van Heerden ()
Additional contact information
Petor Dixon: Centre of Policy Studies and Impact Project (COPS) Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
Jan Van Heerden: Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa.

No 201472, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we measure the economy-wide impact of the 2014 labour strike in South Africa’s platinum industry. The strike lasted five months, ending in June 2014 when producers reached an agreement with the main labour unions. The immediate impacts on local mining towns were particularly severe, but our research shows that the strike could also have long lasting negative impacts on the South African economy as a whole. We find that it is not the higher nominal wages itself that caused the most damage, but the possible reaction by investors in the mining industry towards South Africa. Investor con…dence is likely to be, at least, temporarily harmed, in which case it would take many years for the effects of the strike to disappear. We conduct our analysis using a dynamic CGE model of South Africa.

Keywords: Platinum mining strike; computable general equilibrium; UPGEM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C68 J52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2014-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-cmp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Journal Article: The impact of the 2014 platinum mining strike in South Africa: An economy-wide analysis (2015)
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