Tracking total factor productivity across industries in South Africa

Daan Steenkamp and Jurgens Fourie

EconStor Research Reports from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: We show that national total factor productivity estimates mask significant heterogeneity across industries. Our estimates imply that there has been broad-based decline in productivity since the global financial crisis, particularly for mining, manufacturing and construction. While we highlight challenges to measuring productivity in South Africa, we show that our estimates are broadly similar to estimates from other international agencies. Over the long term, productivity is a key determinant of a country's per capita income. South Africa's poor productivity performance since 1990 is therefore very concerning. Our estimates have profound policy implications, highlighting the impact that electricity and logistical constraints, rising regulatory compliance costs, policy uncertainty and municipal mismanagement.

Keywords: productivity; TFP; production functions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 O47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/335705/1/C ... n_SouthAfrica_26.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:esrepo:335705

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Research Reports from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().