The impact of the 2014 platinum mining strike in South Africa: An economy-wide analysis

Heinrich Bohlmann (), J.H. Van Heerden, Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer

Economic Modelling, 2015, vol. 51, issue C, 403-411

Abstract: In this paper we measure the economy-wide impact of the 2014 labour strike in South Africa's platinum industry. The strike lasted 5months, 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 confidence 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)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026499931500214X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of the 2014 Platinum Mining Strike in South Africa: An Economy-Wide Analysis (2014)
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:eee:ecmode:v:51:y:2015:i:c:p:403-411

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2015.08.010

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly

More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().