While the informal sector is the ‘forgotten’ sector in many ways, it provides livelihoods, employment and income for about 2.5 million workers and business owners. One in every six South Africans who work, work in the informal sector. Almost half of these work in firms with employees; these...

This paper considers whether or not the poor performance of many African countries can be ascribed to a dependency on primary commodity exports. This is a multidimensional question which concerns the Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis, commodity price volatility, the dependence of GDP on exports and the...