Two Stellenbosch professors win Montias prize

Two professors from the Department of Economics' LEAP group, Dieter von Fintel and Johan Fourie, won the 2020 Montias Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Comparative Economics over the past two years. The paper is entitled "The great divergence in South Africa: Population and wealth dynamics over two centuries" (available on Sciencedirect) and investigates the effects of long-run institutional shocks in South Africa's economic history on population and wealth. The paper makes the case that black South Africans lived under two extractive regimes which favoured small elites. Democracy brought inclusive institutions, however the institutional transformation remains incomplete. The paper draws out the implications for the spatial patterns of poverty in the present day.