O18

Since Marshall's (1890) work on industrial districts in 19^{th} century England, agglomeration economies are credited for providing the needed catalytic role to economic growth and development. It does this by allowing critical masses, where knowledge spillovers among firms; labour market pooling;...

Policymakers need better information regarding wellbeing inequality to ascertain the contributing factors and to determine whether policy has been successful in improving the spread over time. In this paper, we construct a multidimensional composite wellbeing measure, at a micro level, which...

Quality of life (QoL) is now widely recognised as a multidimensional concept. This study validates an instrument to measure multidimensional QoL, and investigates the relationships between the domains thereof. The domains analysed are: health, housing and infrastructure, socio-economic status,...

The purpose of this study is to add to the empirical literature regarding quality of life convergence dynamics. It achieves this by analysing and comparing income and income-independent quality of life (IIQoL) convergence dynamics across South Africa's 234 municipalities for the period 1996-2014...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between crime and the entry of firms across local municipalities in South Africa. We use data on the incidence of crime, sourced from the South African Police Service, and a unique database of business registrations over the period 2003 to 2011, to show...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between population density and non-economic quality of life. Popular opinion has generally been that population density can be seen as beneficial for economic growth, as it allows for greater productivity, greater incomes and can be...

Over the past two decades, many African countries have carried out reforms aimed at decentralizing the political, administrative and fiscal structures of the public sector. The need to transform the structure of governance is informed by the view that decentralization increases the overall...