Accurate measures of productivity growth are an important policy tool but are difficult to obtain in South African circumstances. In this article, we review work on the measurement of farm-level productivity in South Africa since the earliest attempts at multifactor indices in the early 1990s....

Conradie et al. (2009a and 2009b) identified the Central Karoo as the worst performing area in the Western Cape, but left the reasons for the region's declining total factor productivity (TFP) unexplained. The current paper uses a combination of literature review and analysis of anecdotal...