SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT REGIONS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN SPACE ECONOMY

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inequalities in levels of socio-economic development between different areas in a country occur all over the world. Various theories and models have been formulated to describe these inequalities. In the model of development regions, formulated by Friedmann in 1966, the national economy consists of core, upward-transitional, downward-transitional, resource frontier and special problem regions. In this paper, 17 socioeconomic variables were identified to characterise the five types of development regions. The socio-economic data for the variables were obtained from the 1996 population census and other reports of Statistics South Africa. Principal component, cluster and discriminant analyses were used to demarcate the South African space-economy into a hierarchy of development regions, ranging from the highly developed core region to the special problem regions in need of development assistance. The demarcation confirmed the existence of an uneven spatial pattern of socio-economic development in South Africa. The core-periphery structure is still an established pattern. The demarcation also proved that Friedmann's model of development regions can be used to describe the spatial imbalances in the South African space economy.