Population and Economic Growth, 1910–33: A Survey

Abstract

The first twenty-three years of the new South African state were not particularly happy ones for the economy and, in this respect, the South African experience was not unlike that of Canada. Yet progress was made. The laws of the four provinces were gradually harmonised with respect to economic matters and gold continued to meet the country’s needs for foreign exchange. The First World War gave an impetus to industrialisation; but the war-induced inflation, at a time of a fixed gold price, placed a question mark over the future of the mining industry that was not erased in this period, notwithstanding the development of the mines of the East Rand in the early 1920s.