Savings and economic growth: a historical analysis of the Cape Colony economy, 1850–1909

The savings-development nexus is a topical issue in current development literature. No study has yet explored this relationship in nineteenth-century ‘South African’ colonies. An historical analysis of the development of the savings’ trends in South Africa may assist in understanding development trends in the twentieth century. Apart from general descriptions of the nature of economic activity in the Cape Colony very little is known about the role of savings and financial sector development in the growing colonial economy. This paper describes and surveys the nature of financial markets in the Cape Colony between 1850 and 1909 and seeks to explain the relationship between savings and economic growth. Savings is defined in the broad sense of monetary and non-monetary savings and would be assumed to be a proxy for financial development in the Cape Colony. This paper contributes to the economic history literature on the colonial past of South Africa by using recently compiled data on the GDP (Greyling & Verhoef 2015) as well as monetary savings and non-monetary savings (livestock) to test whether the general view that ‘financial development is robustly growth promoting’ can be substantiated in the last half of the nineteenth-century Cape Colony. The Johansen vector error correction model technique is applied to determine the relationship between savings and economic growth. It is found that despite the expectations in the literature that financial deepening contributes to economic growth, the Cape Colony did not display such causal relationship in the period under review.