This study undertakes a critical assessment of the legal protection of foreign direct investments (FDI) in South Africa and Zimbabwe by determining their compliance with the international minimum standards, norms and/or best practices on the legal protection of FDI by host states. Firstly, the study argues that foreign investment is much needed in South Africa and Zimbabwe to improve economic growth and development, to create jobs, and to increase their competitiveness. However, these benefits are not accrued automatically but rather host states need to create an enabling environment to receive such benefits. Thus, host states need to put an investment scheme into operation to guarantee the legal protection of foreign investments. South Africa and Zimbabwe have at large crafted and implemented investment laws and related policies which tend to be hostile towards foreign investments. Therefore, similar investment laws and related policies in both jurisdictions are analysed. This study will also offer recommendations for a legal investment which is not only flexible, friendly, and favourable to foreign investment in South Africa and Zimbabwe but also advances their local economic policies.

This study undertakes a critical assessment of the legal protection of foreign direct investments (FDI) in South Africa and Zimbabwe by determining their compliance with the international minimum standards, norms and/or best practices on the legal protection of FDI by host states. Firstly, the study argues that foreign investment is much needed in South Africa and Zimbabwe to improve economic growth and development, to create jobs, and to increase their competitiveness. However, these benefits are not accrued automatically but rather host states need to create an enabling environment to receive such benefits. Thus, host states need to put an investment scheme into operation to guarantee the legal protection of foreign investments. South Africa and Zimbabwe have at large crafted and implemented investment laws and related policies which tend to be hostile towards foreign investments. Therefore, similar investment laws and related policies in both jurisdictions are analysed. This study will also offer recommendations for a legal investment which is not only flexible, friendly, and favourable to foreign investment in South Africa and Zimbabwe but also advances their local economic policies.

Zimbabwe has had a chaotic foreign direct investment (FDI) regime. This has created the need for a detailed volume on the most important developments around the protection and treatment of FDI, at not only a domestic level, but also at bilateral, regional and international levels. The author argues that while Zimbabwe has now harmonised, previously scattered legislation under the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency Act [Chapter 14:37] and taken measures to reverse (to varying degrees) controversial policies such as the land reform programme and the Indigestion and Economic Empowerment Policy, scepticism still prevails over the investor-friendliness of the FDI regime in Zimbabwe.

The emergent so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is regarded by some as a panacea for bringing about development to Africans. This book dismisses this flawed reasoning. Surfacing how “investors” are actually looting and plundering Africa; how the industrial internet of things, the gig economies, digital economies and cryptocurrencies breach African political and economic sovereignty, the book pioneers what can be called anticipatory economics – which anticipate the future of economies. It is argued that the future of Africans does not necessarily require degrowth, postgrowth, postdevelopment, postcapitalism or sharing/solidarity economies: it requires attention to age-old questions about African ownership and control of their resources. Investors have to invest in ensuring that Africans own and control their resources. Further, it is pointed out that the historical imperial structural creation of forced labour is increasingly morphing into what we call the structural creation of forced leisure which is no less lethal for Africans. Because both the structural creation of forced labour and the structural creation of forced leisure are undergirded by transnational neo-imperial plunder, theft, robbery, looting and dispossession of Africans, this book goes beyond the simplistic arguments that Euro-America developed due to the industrial revolutions.

This book analyzes the new political economy of land reform in South Africa. It takes a holistic approach to understand South Africa’s land reform, assesses the current policy gaps, and suggests ways of filling them. Due to its cross-disciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a broad audience, and will benefit readers from the fields of policy reform, administration, law, political science, political economics, agricultural economics, global politics, resource studies and development studies.