v116n3a10 Trends in productivity in the South African gold
Gold mining in South Africa started more than a century ago in the Witwatersrand goldfields. Most of the highgrade gold deposits have been exhausted and mines now exploit lower grades. This means that optimization is required to derive optimal value from the remaining lowgrade and deeplying deposits (Musingwini, 2014). Figure 3 shows the arithmetic mean of the ore grade of the main gold