Entrepreneurs unrecorded: the business of women in Africa
Grietjie Verhoef

Throughout history, human capital has built enterprise and society and more than half a century of historical research acknowledged the vital role of women in economic activity and business enterprise. Women‘s place in business in Africa has been gaining scant attention in the Business History scholarship. Until recently Gerda Lerner gave the ‘majority its past’ when the full lens of human agency gradually began to shape our understanding of history. Extensive literature has positioned western women in business since 1500 as part of the realm of enterprise and not confined to a ‘separate sphere’, as put forward but refuted in western historiography. More culturally integrated traditional economic systems have obscured African women’s history of business engagement. There is a serious gap in Business History concerning African women’s business entrepreneurship. This paper identifies that gap and explores the reasons behind this limited scholarship in Business History.

The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment Inflows on Exports in South Africa
Nomfundo P. Vacu-Ngqila

This study examines the impact of foreign direct investment inflows on exports of goods and services in South Africa. To empirically examine this, the study employed the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach and time series data covering the period from 1988 to 2021. The study examined the impact of foreign direct investment inflows on aggregate exports of goods and services (Model 1) and exports of intermediate goods (Model 2). For model 1, the findings confirmed that foreign direct investment inflows have a positive impact on aggregate exports both in the long run, and short run. When exports of intermediate goods are used as a proxy for exports, the results confirmed that foreign direct investment inflows have no long-run significant effect on exports, while it has a positive significant effect in the short run. Based on these findings, the study recommends that policymakers should design macroeconomic policies.

The Politics of Self-Pity and its effect on Democracy
Fintan O’Toole

A good place to begin might be with statements by Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance a fortnight ago. Vance was explaining why he had amplified and spread the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating the pet cats and dogs of indigenous residents – a claim that Trump himself had made in his televised debate against Kamala Harris. Vance implicitly acknowledged that this story is fictional but added that “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Private planning: The emerging capitalism of financial and technological centralisation
Marco Rangone and Stefano Solari

In the political economy, centralisation is a relevant economic phenomenon that has received little attention. This concept points to the architecture of allocative decision-making in an economic system. The economic and financial concentration of the last thirty years and technological change have progressively forced dependence on increasingly fewer decision centres. We single out three dimensions of centralisation—namely, the increased size of relevant corporations and their dependence on a few financial players (the Hilferding problem), the diffusion of technologies that produce interactive or social environments in which an increasing part of economic evaluations and transactions take place (platform capitalism) and the diminishing relevance of national political jurisdictions concerning decisions on how to legally and institutionally frame the economic space.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
Ruth Ben-Ghiat

W.W. Norton and Company: New York (2021), 390 pages
ISBN 978-0-393-86841

‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’ George Santayana.
At a time that a dark side of history is threatening to repeat (with, as just one example, a recent study (R. Riedl et al. ‘Democratic backsliding, resilience, and resistance’ (World Politics January 2024) documenting democratic backsliding in a record number of even wealthy countries), this book focuses critical attention on the characteristics of previous

Review by Ken Friedman .

Substance over Form: Determination of when a notifiable merger transaction has taken place
through the lens of the SABC/MultiChoice ‘merger’
Simbarashe Tavuyanago

This article discusses the role of merger regulation in the protection and maintenance of competition. In that context, it then discusses the merger notification process in terms of the South African Competition Act. In terms of the Act, parties that wish to conclude a merger must notify the authorities before implementation. Where parties conclude a merger without the approval of or in contravention of conditions imposed by the authorities, the Act provides several remedies to cure the infringement. This approach is in line with international best practice regarding the setting of thresholds and the need to notify competition authorities of mergers that meet the thresholds. To elucidate the requirements for notification and consequences of non-notification, the article examines the channel distribution agreement between the SABC and MultiChoice, which the Competition Commission deemed a notifiable merger. After the Commission’s determination, it deferred the matter to the Competition Tribunal to make a final determination. The article notes that while the Commission’s interpretation and application of the Act in determining that a merger transaction took place was correct, it abdicated its responsibilities regarding remedies to the Tribunal and failed to bring finality to the matter.