Working Paper 60 - Trade Liberalization and Growth: Policy Options for African Countries in a Global Economy

African countries have not embraced trade liberalization in the manner thatother developing regions have. Protectionist measures have taken various forms,including tariffs, quantitative restrictions, exchange controls and downrightimport bans. A significant number of researchers have attributed, in part, thepoor performance of African economies to the protectionist trade practices.Economists have made sustained efforts at cataloguing the welfare costs oftrade barriers and emphasizing the gains from trade in order to advance policiesto reverse protectionist practices. In fact new growth theorists contend thattraditional analysis tended to consistently underestimate the welfare costs ofprotectionism, because they ignored the effects of the introduction of new goodson technological progress, domestic production and growth associated withfree trade. In this paper we conclude that while opening an economy to trademay not provide the desired quick fix, the removal or relaxation of quantitativeimport and export restrictions and lowering of tariffs would result in increasedexports and growth. The dawn of a global economy ushered in by universaltrade liberalization, therefore, need not spell catastrophe for African economiesas is widely feared.“In a major report in the late 1950’s T.K. Whittaker wrote ‘Sooner or later,protectionism will have to go, and the challenge of free trade accepted, if Irelandwishes to keep pace with the rest of Europe’ ”Former US President Bill Clinton, in his Remarks to the People of Dundalk,Ireland, Courthouse Square, Dundalk, 12 December 2000 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/new/december2000/speech12_12c.html)

Working Paper 35 - Privatization of Public Enterprises in Zambia: An Evaluation of the Policies, Procedures and Experiences

The term Privatization is often loosely used to mean a number of related activities, including any expansion of the scope of private sector activity in an economy and the adoption by the public sector of efficiency enhancing techniques commonly employed by the private sector. While acknowledging that no definition of privatization is water tight, we will define privatization, for the purpose of this paper, as the transfer of productive asset ownership and control from the public to the private sector.1 The transfer of assets can be total, partial or functionary, with the sale being implemented by methods such as private sales, leasing arrangements, employee buy outs and share issues. In Africa, many governments have embraced the idea of privatization, brought to the fore mainly as a part of the adjustment and stabilization programs of the mid-eighties and the nineties. Privatization now frequently features in government policy statements and in conditionalities from donors. The past decade has also seen the World Bank and other donors get increasingly involved in lending operations towards parastatal sector reforms that included privatization components. African countries share a number of common features in relation to the drive towards privatization. For most of these countries, the first twenty years of independence were characterized by rapid growth, driven by favorable terms of trade and high levels of public investments in infrastructure and services. The development of import substituting industries brought in the dramatic rise of parastatal corporations, which were also used as vehicles for increased local participation in the economies. Many governments moved to nationalize existing foreign interests in their countries and also to create new state enterprises to carry out the various production and trading functions. Parastatal corporations rapidly dominated the extractive industries, manufacturing and financial sectors of their economies, and acquired important economic and political status, becoming major sources of employment. The moderate growth experienced in the seventies, however, was quickly reversed by the financial crisis of the early eighties, and associated inefficiencies made parastatal sector reform a major element in the reform efforts implemented by the countries. Zambia was one of the earlier countries to embark on a major privatization exercise as part of its economic reform program started in 1992. Although progress was initially slow, mainly due to the inertia associated with start up activities and generally opposition from interested parties2, the program picked up momentum in the last two years, culminating in the rapid divestiture of public enterprises that many have compared only to privatization programs in eastern Europe. This paper reviews the privatization program in Zambia, highlighting the major tools and mechanisms employed, and the achievements and constraints faced by the authorities in privatizing one of the largest public sectors in Africa. The paper begins with a brief overview of the main economic issues surrounding moves towards privatization of public enterprises.

ConSemblEX: A Consensus-Based Transcriptome Assembly Approach that Extends ConSemble and Improves Transcriptome Assembly

An accurate transcriptome is essential to understanding biological systems enabling omics analyses such as gene expression, gene discovery, and gene-regulatory network construction. However, assembling an accurate transcriptome is challenging, especially for organisms without adequate reference genomes or transcriptomes. While several methods for transcriptome assembly with different approaches exist, it is still difficult to establish the most accurate methods. This thesis explores the different transcriptome assembly methods and compares their performances using simulated benchmark transcriptomes with varying complexity. We also introduce ConSemblEX to improve a consensus-based ensemble transcriptome assembler, ConSemble, in three main areas: we provide the ability to use any number of assemblers, provide a variety of consensus assembly outputs, and provide information about the effect of each assembler in the final assembly. Using five assembly methods both in the de novo and genome-guided approaches, we showed how ConSemblEX can be used to explore various strategies for consensus assembly, such as ConSemblEX-4+, to find the optimum assembly. Compared to the original ConSemble, ConSemblEX improved the de novo assembly performance, increasing the precision by 14% and F1 by 5%, and significantly reducing the FP by 49%. In the genome-guided assembly, ConSemblEX had identical performance to the original ConSemble. We showed that ConSemblEX provides tools to explore how different methods perform and behave depending on the datasets. With the ConSemblEX-select assembly, we further demonstrated that we can improve consensus-based assembly more by choosing optimum overlap sets among different methods. Such information provides the foundation to develop machine learning algorithms in the future to further improve transcriptome assembly performance. Adviser: Jitender Deogu

Personality and content preferences on social network sites in South Africa

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Management in Strategic Marketing Johannesburg, 2016Worldwide, visual content, such as photos and videos, have increased dramatically on social network sites (SNS), with South Africa being no exception. Due to these developments, marketers are increasingly interested in the factors that impact the usage of these sites, in order to develop branded content that will attract and engage users. However, there is a lack of academic research revealing how individual consumer factors, such as personality, influence SNS users’ preferences for different types of content on SNS, particularly within an emerging market such as South Africa. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between two personality traits – need for cognition (NFC) and need for affect (NFA) – and visual and verbal content preference on SNS in South Africa. The study also briefly examined whether demographic variables (gender and age) and SNS usage factors had an impact on the relationships between these variables. An online survey and pen-and-paper questionnaire were conducted. 307 social network site users were obtained primarily from two South African universities through convenience sampling. Data was analysed using correlation analysis, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and standard multiple linear regression on SPSS. The main findings showed that personality does have an influence (albeit small) on SNS users’ preference for visual or verbal content, and warrants consideration by marketing organisations in the design of SNS content. Visual content preference on SNS was found to have a positive relationship with NFA and a negative relationship with NFC. Verbal content preference had a positive relationship with NFC but no significant relationship with NFA. Demographic and SNS usage variables showed mixed results in their impact on SNS content preference. It was recommended that future studies include other variables that could affect SNS content preference, as well as use more objective measures (rather than self-reporting) to determine SNS users’ actual behaviour. Key words: Social network sites, personality traits, need for cognition, need for affect, visual content, verbal content, South Africa, emerging marketGR201

Zambia Revenue Authority v Matalloy Company Limited SCZ/08/016/2020

Justice Mumba Malila supplements the jurisprudence on tax law in this judgment that deals with the obligation of a taxpayer in tax cases. The case focused on the responsibility of taxpayers to prove their eligibility for a tax credit from the Zambia Revenue Authority. Briefly, the case also discusses the concept of tax credits, and their use by taxpayers

Tuberculosis in prisons in sub-Saharan Africa--a potential time bomb.

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Multiple Livelihoods and Wastewater Irrigation Farming in Peri Urban Areas in Zambia: Opportunities and Challenges

The urban poor use heavy metal contaminated wastewater in production of crops to sustain their livelihood in Zambia Despite the inherent dangers of food crop contaminations and potential health risks associated with consumption of heavy metal contaminated food crops a lot of people engaged in wastewater irrigation farming as a source of livelihood in peri urban areas in Zambia The study focused on the urban poor engaged in cultivation of crops using heavy metal contaminated industrial wastewater and domestic sewage in order to sustain their livelihoods in peri urban areas of Mufulira and Kafue towns in Zambia To study investigated the livelihoods of people engaged in crop production using heavy metal contaminated wastewater Two study field sites were selected in the peri-urban areas of Mufulira in the Copperbelt Province and Kafue in Lusaka Province in Zambia The snowball principle was used to select informal crop cultivators at two study sites A total of 31 crop cultivators were sampled at New Farm study site in Mufulira from 26th April 2007 to 14th November 2007 whilst a total of 29 crop cultivators were sampled at Chilumba Gardens study site in Kafue from 17th September 2013 to 12th December 2013 The interview schedules were administered to selected crop cultivators The results indicated that the majority of informal crop cultivators had attained primary education and engaged in multiple livelihood activities for self sustenance The majority of crop cultivators were poor by Zambian Government standards There were multiple sources of labour while there were multiple markets for selling of crops The benefits of crop production include improved food security at the households and income generation which contribute to accumulation of capital used to invest into other economic activities apart from crop production Consumption of heavy metal contaminated food crops and informal access to the land cultivated were the major challenges In conclusion th