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This chapter reviews income and welfare measurement and examines the central topics of assets and sustainability with the evaluation of key conceptual and theoretical literature. It also outlines the methods of asset accounting and presents selected empirical results from ‘greening’ the national accounts. Linkages to policy are explored, followed by broad conclusions on some basic questions: To what extent has the promise of environmental accounting been realized? Which approach has the greatest policy significance? And where is environmental accounting likely to be most useful? Finally, it studies the recent empirical results from Southern Africa and explores policy linkage with concluding remarks.

Between the 1860s and the First World War, all the indigenous inhabitants of southern and central Africa were brought under British rule. Historical writing on southern Africa, including what later became British Central Africa, began at the same time. Most English-speaking historians writing in South Africa after the First World War were certain that colonial expansion and white settlement were necessary for the economic uplift and civilizing of Africans, but highly critical of the racial policies being espoused by Afrikaner nationalists. With the British Empire virtually coming to an end in the 1950s and 1960s, and the transition to a multiracial majority-ruled Commonwealth receiving its greatest challenge in apartheid South Africa and federating Central Africa, Thompson’s contemporaries focused on the historical roles of white settlers and Imperial officials in bringing about division when there should have been unity. The writing of history has not flourished on campuses in the independent states, and the bulk of work done has been pursued in the universities of Europe and North America. In such circumstances, debate about the legacy of Empire will be as intense in the future as it has been in the past.

The US and the Western European countries certainly had their differences over various European questions, but all debate took place against the background of a Soviet threat that disturbed the entire ‘free world’ and a NATO framework that had been established to deal with this threat. However, disagreements over out‐of‐area disputes (i.e. disputes outside the area covered by core Article 5 of the NATO treaty) between the US and many Western European countries were even more frequent and the common framework much weaker. At the beginning of the post‐war period, the US definitely saw itself as an anti‐colonial power, and its strong anti‐colonial views spurred progress towards independence not only for India and other British colonial territories, but also for those of other European colonies. The different sections of this chapter look at the changing nature of America's colonial policy, particularly in the face of prospects that communists might take control of a former European territory, and at its increasing role in other out‐of‐area questions, over the period 1945–1975. The areas discussed are East Asia (French Indo‐china, China, and the Korean and Vietnamese wars), the Middle East, and Southern Africa and Cuba. In addition a whole separate section is devoted to the Vietnam conflict, and another to the various disputes that led the Nixon administration to pronounce 1973 the ‘Year of Europe’ in an effort to bring the US and Western Europe close after a period of dispute that had involved, in particular, American support to Israel.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the severe AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa. The region accounts for over one third of all people living with HIV in the world, and the nine countries with the highest prevalence in the world are in Southern Africa. Given these sobering statistics, as well as a continued high spread of HIV, the situation can be characterized as “hyperendemic.” The remainder of the chapter covers the vulnerability of women to HIV in Southern Africa; the drivers of hyperendemic HIV; the impact of apartheid and its ramifications on current sexual behavior, and hence the spread of HIV; the role of government policy in curbing HIV infection and death; and progress in the AIDS response in Southern Africa.

Health is an outcome of the circumstances of people's lives, the communities and environments in which people live and work, the nature of the social relationships, goods, and services people encounter, and the choices people make around these conditions. This chapter identifies these influences over the distribution of health and well-being across population groups, countries, and regions. It outlines models used to summarize and explain the social determinants of health. Further, it considers the types of interventions and actions that must be taken outside the health sector to improve the distribution of health and well-being, and what that implies for the role of the health sector within the wider health system. In some aspects, the chapter draws on the learning from the work in the World Health Organization (WHO) Commission of the Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), and particularly the Health Systems Knowledge network of the CSDH, and the learning and analysis from work in the Regional Network for Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa (EQUINET).

This book is concerned with institutions carrying the designation ngoma and related terms. By entering African religious and therapeutic expression through its own language, some important underlying, and possibly historic, commonalities and connections are identified. This can also help in the establishing of the basis for variants and transformations more intelligibly. A review of some of the scholarship relating to healing in community settings in Central and Southern Africa is presented. In addition, an extensive field survey of ngoma manifestations in four settings of Sub-Saharan Africa where the literature suggested it occurred is provided. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of the other chapters included in this book.

This chapter focuses on the competition policies of selected countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, specifically Kenya, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and the island of Mauritius. The eastern and southern countries’ competition authorities span a range of functionality, from very high to almost inert. Even the highest functioning competition authorities face severe challenges in terms of financial and human capital, corruption, political pressure to favor government cronies and vested interests, and sometimes war and bankruptcy. Other challenges that competition authorities face concern the privileges of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), corruption through government procurement, and a plethora of not always transparent cross-border restraints. Even though their agendas are crowded by mandatory duties of vetting mergers and authorizing agreements, the best of agencies carve out precious time to identify the most harmful market obstructions and develop strategies to solve them.

This chapter, by Ian Phimister, examines the global financial dynamics of the southern African and “Westralian” gold-mining share manias of the 1890s. Examination of both mining share markets suggests that, contrary to the conventional portrait painted of gold rushes, the defining picture is less one of prospectors rushing to pan for gold or peg claims than it is one of company promoters scurrying to fleece investors. The most frenzied activity was on the floor of the London Stock Exchange, not on the South African Highveld or the dry, dusty plains of Western Australia. More minted gold was found in London and the Home Counties than mined gold was located in Southern Africa or Western Australia. It is an exercise that once again questions the efficiency of late Victorian capital markets, even as it points to the consequences of the “portal of globalization” opened by finance.

Chapter 3 argues that the ILO’s decent work agenda is insensitive to the needs of countries with high unemployment. We identify thirteen developing countries whose unemployment rate in 2016 was over twice the mean for low- and middle-income countries. Most are war-torn, post-communist, and unfree. However, for a set of Southern African countries, high unemployment is the consequence of domestic policy within a regional context of relatively limited opportunities for smallholder agriculture and dominated by the strength of the South African economy. Contemporary development policy advice, especially from the ILO, prioritizes labour productivity growth without confronting the need to foster relatively low-productivity employment to provide jobs for large numbers of relatively unskilled people in these countries. Rising labour productivity in the surplus labour countries during the 2000s came at the cost of stagnant, and even falling, employment rates. Given inadequate welfare support for the unemployed, such growth paths undermined inclusive development in these countries.

This chapter places the history of Botatwe communities’ changing subsistence practices in a broader, transregional context. Botatwe societies lived in a territory that constituted a frontier encircled by multiple and changing heartlands of political and technological innovation. Although the early histories of central and southern Africa have never been told from the perspective of the residents of the lands that bridged them,residents of this central frontier contributed to key changes in the trade, politics, and technologies of both central and southern Africa. As residents of the central frontier, Botatwe communities contributed—sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly—to well-known historical processes, from the extension of Indian Ocean trade networks to sites like Divuyu and Nqoma in the Tsodillo Hills in the late first millennium and sites like Ingombe Ilede some centuries later to the innovation of hereditary status among residents of the Upemba Depression, cultural forefathers to the famous Luba kingdom, and the politics of bushcraft that inspired the familiar hunter-founder figures of the foundation myths of central African savanna kingdoms. By engaging in these processes, Botatwe speakers crafted a durable, but ever-changing political culture valuing worldliness, fame, wealth, and skill as the foundation for an ephemeral politics of status.