The Spatial Distribution of Manufacturing in South Africa 1970-1996, its Determinants and Policy Implications

This paper researches the change in regional specialisation and industry concentration in South African (SA) manufacturing 1970-96, and evaluates possible determinants of industry location. No evident trend towards greater regional specialisation or despecialisation emerges over most of the period if we take the economic weight of the regions into account. However, between 1993 and 1996, the period of international reintegration, all provinces but one became more specialised. Industry concentration also does not show a clear trend if we account for industry size, although industries of the same rank were more concentrated in the early 1990s than the beginning of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on predictions from trade and economic geography models, we find that high plant-internal scale economies, intensity in the use of human capital and high industry-specific productivity gradients between locations are associated with greater geographical concentration of an industry. Scale economies are the most important pro-concentration force. A greater deviation of labour intensity of production from the mean, and strong in term linkages, are associated with low geographical concentration. The latter results can be explained within the economic geography framework. Linkages are the most important determinant of industry geography.Risk measures, expectations hypothesis, South Africa

Poor whites and the post-apartheid labour market: a study of perceptions and experiences of work among residents in a homeless shelter in Johannesburg

Despite historical precedents, poverty among white people in South Africa remains an anomaly and a paradox. Likewise, the perceptions of work and employment among poor (under- and unemployed) whites in contemporary South Africa have received scant attention in the scholarly literature. Using the conceptual frameworks of critical whiteness studies and segmented labour market theory – as a way of combining subjective and objective considerations – this research seeks to describe and explain the perceptions and experiences of the labour market among poor whites living in a homeless shelter in Johannesburg. Eight respondents were chosen for extended, in-depth interviews in an effort to develop a fine-grained understanding of the pre-existing circumstances that affected their access to information and thus shaped their choices in the labour market, as well as to ascertain what they believed to be the barriers that they face in the labour market. The findings varied, with most of the interviewees seeing ‘being white’ as the reason for their poverty and unemployment, while others exhibited some awareness of the role of their lack of skills and qualifications in their capacity to compete in higher segments of the labour market. The findings were also varied in the sense that not all interviewees experienced poverty in the same manner, with some having been part of the middle class prior to becoming poor, while others having been poor their entire lives. It was also found that class or socio-economic status seemed to have a greater impact than race on the labour market prospects of the interviewees. It is argued that the perceptions of these poor whites, which are informed by their lack of information about the workings of the labour market, rather than their lack of qualifications or their race, most affected their prospects in the labour market. The mechanisms they rely on when seeking employment reveal a poor knowledge of the local labour market and the ways in which they think their skillsets match up to the types of jobs they desire. The lack of understanding of the South African labour market and the policies that are in place to redress the legacies of apartheid are among the factors influencing the lack of success these poor whites are experiencing in their search for work

The Filament Sensor for Near Real-Time Detection of Cytoskeletal Fiber Structures

A reliable extraction of filament data from microscopic images is of high interest in the analysis of acto-myosin structures as early morphological markers in mechanically guided differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells and the understanding of the underlying fiber arrangement processes. In this paper, we propose the filament sensor (FS), a fast and robust processing sequence which detects and records location, orientation, length and width for each single filament of an image, and thus allows for the above described analysis. The extraction of these features has previously not been possible with existing methods. We evaluate the performance of the proposed FS in terms of accuracy and speed in comparison to three existing methods with respect to their limited output. Further, we provide a benchmark dataset of real cell images along with filaments manually marked by a human expert as well as simulated benchmark images. The FS clearly outperforms existing methods in terms of computational runtime and filament extraction accuracy. The implementation of the FS and the benchmark database are available as open source.Comment: 32 pages, 21 figure