Impacts of literacy rate and human development indices on agricultural production in South Africa

Abstract

Agriculture is an important sector in South Africa, and the impact that education and human development would have made in this sector via non-white small scale farming was limited through biased policies of the apartheid era. Due to apartheid laws, South Africa found itself with high levels of unskilled labour force. This study seeks to find the impacts of literacy rate and human development indices on agricultural production using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Test approach to co-integration. A long run relationship among the variables, agricultural production (agriculture GDP), literacy rate and human development indices were found. Literacy rate has a positively significant effect on agricultural production in the long run while Human Development Index has a positive and significant impact in the short run. This indicates that the apartheid regime fell short in recognizing the positive effect of education in the agricultural sector by denying a descent education to the majority of non-whites which were farm labourers or small scale farmers. This study provides some policy recommendations.