PALI LEHOHLA | We can map out SA’s future with the power of measurement

Identifying the levers for change in development is at the heart of cartography beyond co-ordinate geography. The conception and representation of stages of agglomerations is based on cartography beyond co-ordinate geography. This wealth of intellect in practice and theory has come of age to answer what will and should be the nature, in content, in form, in space and in time, of sustainable development and more importantly how the agenda is set and what steps are taken to deliver the 17 sustainable development goals of the UN Agenda 2030.

Six strategic areas focused on data and statistics as a public good and not new private oil — after all data and statistics are a product of universal collaborative work. The strategic areas were co-ordination and strategic leadership on data for sustainable development; innovation and modernisation of national statistical systems; strengthening of basic statistical activities and programmes, with particular focus on addressing the monitoring needs of the 2030 Agenda; dissemination and use of sustainable development data; multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development data; mobilise resources and co-ordinate efforts for statistical capacity building. The journey, since the initial step of 2014, has brought together new lessons in the leadership of statistics. There has been a monumental shift from the notion of statistical organisation and office to a nomenclature of a system.

New Zealand especially has been at the forefront of the curve. Their chief statistician is given the authority of a national data steward, who presides over the national data and statistical system. In this regard, this role ensures that data and statistics cannot be new oil that gets privately monetised but remains a truly public good. That resolves the privatisation of what is organically public and non-rival. Liberating and unleashing the power of measurement can improve the quality of our politics and life. This column is an outcome and a step towards the definition of what the world that counts should deliver in space and time. Central to this and giving meaning to this objective is cartography beyond co-ordinate geography.

We have to heed Lord Kevin when he says: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”

Soulless co-ordinate-based cartography creates spatial hierarchies that smack of huge agglomerations reflecting spatial inequities.

That is the essence of the platform Statistics South Africa was privileged with by hosting the first UN World Forum on Lord Kevin’s call of the quest to unleash the power of measurement. We need to disabuse ourselves of politics of disrespect, relieve the world of the burdens of ignorance-inspired politics and move rapidly to data- and statistics-driven politics. Politics as the expression of a humanity-based intentionality powered by cartography beyond co-ordinate geography. It recognises that economic fortunes amid huge economic misfortunes is not an act of an uncaring God or Allah, but one of a deliberate act that absents from our consciousness the creation of agglomerations.

Soulless co-ordinate-based cartography creates spatial hierarchies that smack of huge agglomerations reflecting spatial inequities. Dry mathematical and statistical economic analyses that are devoid of geography and culture avoid geographically weighted regression analysis — a subject that reveals the power of geography and culture. Neoliberalismcontinues to rob the world by first stripping the soul of economics — culture from itself and stripping off geography, the representation of economics in space. Time has arrived for cartography to restore the dignity of human effort. This is what cartography beyond co-ordinate geography should bring about. It is when cartography embraces cultural economic geography that a different world where no-one is left behind will materialise. This will generate a new science of understanding the driving motives of agglomerations and enable the globe to make choices in humanity-enhancing agglomerations, away from extortionist and extractionist-based agglomerations based on content-free cartography of co-ordinate geography. Culture and geography bring meaning to cartography — they reveals its great beauty.

The Cinderella of our times has come of age. Cultural economic geography has catapulted cartography to the fore. Challenging it to be a discipline that should go beyond co-ordinate geography. But one that defines the complex relationship of cultural economic geography which spawns contiguous and variable co-ordinate geometry. I postulate that economic geography; public policy design and attendant approaches be aimed at regional science as a discipline. I also suggest that borrowing from the work of Mariana Mazzucato on the Entrepreneurial State and the notion of public purpose is an important arrow in the war chest of cartography beyond co-ordinate geometry.

R Hausmann’s advancement of the diffusion of know-how within a locality as a driver of growth in contradistinction from comparative advantage, as propounded by Adam Smith, is worth noting. This is truly relevant for neighbourhood-based production activities for productivity gains and growth. Paul Krugman’s introduction of new economic geography and Andres Rodrigues-Polse on evolutionary geography working papers provide important insights and call for the execution of cartography beyond co-ordinate geography to action. In this regard there is need for deep analysis of contents within, between and among cultural economic geographies. However, these spheres of geography need not be resident in contiguous co-ordinate geography. They may and often reside within variable co-ordinate geometry.

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose contends that because institutions shape regional and urban development, understanding them is important. Their role has revealed immense gaps which if observed and responded to with appropriate tools can resolve some of the stubborn consequences of economic policies — that the best of intentions often lead to territorial divergence. Rodriguez-Pose says: “The dominant development policies are proving less than capable of providing answers to these challenges. Strategies based on a mix of physical and human capital and technology have not succeeded in dealing with growing territorial inequality and its treacherous economic, social and political consequences.”

The Equality Trust of the UK estimates that the one hundred richest people own as much wealth as the 30% poorest households, which is about 18-million people. In the Price of Inequality, Joseph Stiglitz moves from the premise that accumulated political power is aggressively assistive to inequality, and this phenomenon is self-perpetuating. The wealth lobby are the legislative levers of regulatory activity. He argues that it is an illusion that the free market is powerful; what is powerful is politics that has “shaped the market and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest”. He identifies rent-seeking conduct as the main driver of inequality as the powerful shape monopolies and negotiate low taxes with ever unmet promise for the poor to be better. He concludes that the result “is not only morally wrong but also hurts the productivity in the economy”. Thomas Piketty, like Stiglitz, contends that the rise of inequality has its bearing in political ideas. In Capital in the 21st Century he argues that the fundamental problem is that the rate of return to capital is greater than growth, and as the mystery of interest powers ahead, wages and growth recede. The net result is excessive rewards to the owners of capital. Such a situation is not sustainable under any circumstances. He contends that better tools to address this problem are necessary. Among these is an updating effort of the last century’s social-democratic and fiscal-liberal programme.

Paul Krugman’s view is that: “Economic geography is a discipline that studies the location, distribution and spatial organisation of economic activities across the world. In this regard, not only is co-ordinate geography a container but it is also both a determinant and product of this discipline. Over the years, economic geography has taken various approaches to different subject matters such as the location of industries, the benefits firms obtain by locating near each other (economies of agglomeration), transportation geography which studies the connection and movement between people and goods. Other subject matters include the relationship between the environment and economy, international trade, urban areas economics, real estate, and development, as well as gentrification which is the revival and development of urban neighbourhoods which are in bad condition.”

The Journal of Economic Geography defines economic geography as the subfield of human geography which studies economic activity. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics. The interrogation of economic geography has two strong strands. The neoclassicaltheorists propound one, and in this regard, “they focus on industrial location and apply quantitative methods.” It is said that since the 1970s there has been heavy critique of the neoclassical approach to economic geography. A Marxist political economy view has emerged, led by the work of David Harvey. This branch of economic geography is seen as the New Economic Geography, which considers the social, cultural and institutional factors in the spatial economy.

The branches of Economic Geography are inter alia, “geography of agriculture, geography of industry, geography of international trade, geography of resources, geography of transport and communications, geography of finance”.

From this perspective it is clear that geography as a physical space for a range of economic and social activities would be topologically variable and not necessarily contiguous. With the advent of the statistical standard of the System of Economic and Environmental Accounting (SEEA), economic geography is getting even broader. It is argued therefore that different researchers apply different methods such as the neoclassical theorists who apply quantitative methods and on the other end of the scale are those who follow Marxist political theory. A new branch called new economic geography (NEG) considers all aspects to do with social, cultural and institutional factors.

In this regard Rodrigues-Pose points out two areas that should change the dial. First, it is important to recognise how the quality of institutions and government affect development strategies. The quality of governance has an important and direct impact on the economic performance of territories. Second, the orientation of these approaches to both economic and territorial development suggests that institutions matter, which implies that markets are created and not self-made entities that know best and advocate for small government. In the stable of informality emerge the cultural economic geography, the question of trust, openness, networks, tolerance, diversity, creativity and/or social capital.

Essentially, economic geography is the mortar that holds together the ideological posture of policy, options that are available, the array of choices and their execution, monitoring and evaluation across space and time. The World Atlas observes that these schools of thought “use different methods in its study like the neoclassical theorists who focus on quantitative methods while the Marxist political theory and the new economic geography considers all aspects to do with social, cultural, and institutional factors. Therefore, it is an important factor when understood and properly used, it is very beneficial for productivity.”

Economic geography has opened a whole new field driven by geographers as they encroached or reached out to ancillary disciplines. Adding to the complexity of economic geography is the cultural economic geography. Three areas of critique are raised. One such dimension of culture broached under the frame of cultural economic geography is culture in the context of the new economic reality of culture, for instance, as an economy in tourism. Culture is much rooted in localities where it is making its economic mark to qualify as cultural economic geography. The second thrust as stated by Al James, Ron Martin and Peter Sunley is: “On a second level, the development of cultural economic geography also represents an epistemological critique of structurally determinist accounts of economic change, particularly ideas from Marxian political economy, regulation theory, flexible specialisation and neoclassical economics. Scholars have also criticised the tendencies of abstraction ... that reinforces partial explanations, which fail to account fully for complex sociocultural geographies of economic change.” In the third instance is a strategic drive for economic geography to use its historical intellectual space by mobilising the ancillary subjects to raise the might of geography as well as grounded policy-relevant academic discipline.

In our 1999 paper, M Geyer, M Orkin,J Kahimbaara and I were conscious of the influence of economic geography and advocated for a review of the boundaries to enable the organic unity of economic geography policies and economic policies. The paper argues: “During the constitutional talks that preceded the democratic election of South Africa in 1994, final agreement could not be reached on the position of all new provincial boundaries. This resulted in so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ boundaries, the former referring to sections of boundaries on which there was general agreement, and the latter to those where there were still differences of opinion about their position between the negotiating parties. Yet, as the building blocks of the new provinces and as the regional units most often used for planning and administrative purposes, it is the magisterial districts that were most severely distorted by the system of apartheid. In view of the changes that are taking place in the local government system of South Africa currently, especially the new district boundaries that have been announced by the demarcation board in November 1999, the distorting effect apartheid had on the boundaries of the previous magisterial districts, is demonstrated in this article.”

Rodrigues-Pose says classical approaches to explaining what drives economic growth and employment have with time had an unexplained and growing residual. The classical variables that describe growth are physical capital, human capital or labour, and innovation. Evidence is not yet conclusive on what constitutes the components of the error term, but a catch-all phrase called institutions has revealed promise to explaining why some localities advance while others do not, yet they may have similar attributes. Earlier we referred to Krugman, who through the new economic geography school of thought emphasised the role of agglomeration economies, externalities and density. CA Hidalgo and R Housman argue that countries gravitate towards the income level that is dictated by the complexity of their productive structures. They observed that the more complex the economic system of a country, the higher the income. Hidalgo and Housman explain why the strongest driver of exploding GDP per capita for some countries and not others are a consequence of capability accumulation, not only for next neighbour product, but of production of even a further neighbour through forward-linkage capability to a new product. Their assertion suggests that more complex products require more diversification and by this token only through the ensemble of these capabilities in agglomerations does the model work. Urbanisation facilitates these complex systems.

But the important point that Hidalgo and Housman have scratched at is the important point about tradable and non-tradable aspects in the accumulation of capabilities. Hidalgo and Housman also ask, why do the rates of accumulation of capabilities differ? They reason that by bringing plausible arguments regarding the role of institutions, which may mitigate the importation of some activities availed through the international division of labour. Among the non-tradables are property rights, regulation and infrastructure. They conclude that the productivity of a country is driven by the diversity of its available non-tradable capabilities. May it be that the answer to the question by Rodriguez-Polse, of what in institutions makes for growth in some localities and not in others, is buried in these non-tradable institutional capabilities that Hidalgo and Housman referred to?

What then does this all mean for cartography in their quest for relevance beyond co-ordinate geography, especially during the explosion in information technology? Cartography beyond co-ordinate geography can fulfil the mission of abundance. In its representation form we have revealed cartography’s non-rival capabilities. The establishment of UN’s Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management is central to the journey. In Redlands we met at Esri in 2016 as statisticians and cartographers to ponder what a new unified world would look like. This was and continues to be our pursuit of cartography beyond co-ordinate geography.

Let me ask, what will drive future agglomerations? Abram Moletsane, the intellectual and former chief of Bataung, delivers this succinctly in his memoirs of 1878 to 1967, capturing not only the cartography of co-ordinate geography in scarily clear detail, but skilfully and intentionally defining co-ordinate geography in travel, culture, toponymy, progeny and economics. Thus he led well ahead of his time on the essence of cultural, economic geography as an encapsulation of development par excellence. The question for us in South Africa is whether our district development model and the economic recovery and reconstruction plan even begins to approximate cartography as co-ordinate geography in the design, let alone considering the more complex but necessary cartography beyond co-ordinate geography.

Dr Pali Lehohla is the director of the Economic Modelling Academy, a professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a research associate at Oxford University, a board member of Institute for Economic Justice at Wits and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former statistician-general of South Africa.

Towards cultural economic geography as a driver of sustainable development: Cartography beyond co-ordinate geometry was delivered at the 39th International Cartography Conference Cape Town, South Africa on August 17.