Lesotho beyond the elections
Abstract This article examines the mammoth political challenge facing the Basutoland Congress Party‐led government in Lesotho, assessing in particular the regime's capacity to deliver on its key election promises. Thus the main argument is that Lesotho's newly won democracy will mean little or nothing to the people of Lesotho unless it can address their future as a nation within a politically transformed South Africa and their country's seething economic, political and social problems, namely the deepening joblessness, falling agricultural production coupled with malnutrition, stagnant industrial growth, declining living standards, especially among the poorer sections of the population, recurrent political instability and the increasingly inadequate health and education facilities.
Consequences for Lesotho of changing South African labour demand.
Recent changes in the nature of the labor market interaction between South Africa and Lesotho are described and their consequenes for Lesotho are assessed. The author concludes that given the countrys high level of dependence on South Africa while the continuation of the current situation would be bad the possible alternatives in terms of likely changes in South African behavior are worse. (ANNOTATION)
Not much aid and not enough trade: Cloudy prospects in north‐south relations
The North-South Conference was perhaps the first historical dialogue of its kind at the global level between the world's rich and poor.1 Charged with the task of analysing the world energy situation along with the other major economic problems that divided the globe between the haves and the have-nots, the Conference's ultimate concern focused mostly on the issues of international aid and trade. On aid, the western industrial nations voluntarily committed their governments to two separate actions. First, to contribute $1,000 million in a Special Aid Programme for helping the poorest countries in need of resource transfer. Secondly, to increase the volume of real-term official development assistance (ODA) 'effectively and substantially'. This was privately hinted, and unofficially interpreted, to mean a doubling of bilateral and multilateral aid within five years in the case of Japan and the US and working towards the UN target of 0-7 per cent of GNP as annual foreign aid for Canada and other rich donors. In the area of trade, some general and tentative agreements were reached on: a) increased international cooperation in marketing and distribution of primary commodities; b) research and development to ease the burden of competition of synthetics with natural products; c) measures to assist the less developed countries (LDCs) in their efforts toward the diversification of domestic production and exports; d) improvement in the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) in favour of the developing countries; e) special and more favourable treatment of LDCs in the Multilateral Trade Negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).