Globally, women are under-represented in the field of economics. Only a third of all academic research staff in the field of economics in Europe are women. In the US the share is even lower.

The Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED) programme will continue delivering on our mandates during the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Some areas of programme operations however will be subject to temporary disruption during the pandemic – updates will be provided on our website and social media....

For decades cheaper and easily available fossil fuels have underpinned the energy system of South Africa and inhibited the potential for achieving a sustainable low carbon economy. Favourable developments in renewable energy technologies and falling prices provide an opportunity for the country to reduce its emissions significantly without...

This study presents results from a large ensemble of projected changes in seasonal precipitation and near-surface air temperature changes for the nation of South Africa. The ensemble is based on a combination of pattern-change responses derived from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP-5) climate models along with the...

This paper investigates the validity of household survey data published by Statistics South Africa since 1993 and later integrated into the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS). A series of statistical adjustments are proposed, compared, and applied to primary data with the purpose of generating time-comparable, unbiased estimates, and...

This paper proposes an alternative method for modelling long term changes in household consumption in computable general equilibrium models. The analysis is applied to the case of South Africa and focuses on the change in income related lifestyle choices on energy demand and composition. A comparison of adjusting household consumption share (...

This paper reviews land reform in six emerging market economies with some similarities to South Africa, and in sub-Saharan African countries, which share a similar colonial history. While care needs to be taken when trying to transplant policies that have worked in other countries, the paper suggests a number of broad lessons. Land reform is a...

We consider the interplay of climate change impacts, global mitigation policies, and the economic interests of developing countries to 2050. Focusing on Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, we employ a structural approach to biophysical and economic modeling that incorporates climate uncertainty and allows for rigorous comparison of climate,...

This paper seeks to address the following questions: (a) How productive is South Africa’s agricultural sector? (b) How does it compare to other countries in terms of productivity? The approach taken uses neoclassical growth accounting in defining total factor productivity (TFP) growth as the ratio of output and input growth. There are three...

The recent National Health Insurance White Paper proposes redirection of medical tax credits revenue towards the financing of the national health insurance. This raises critical questions about the impact on affordability for the poor as well as fundamental legal implications. The 2012 tax reforms which saw the move from deductions to credits...

The elasticity of taxable income is a key tax policy parameter that plays an important role in the formulation of tax and transfer policy. This paper extends work by Kemp (2019) by using a new panel of individual tax returns and the phenomenon of ‘bracket creep’ to produce updated estimates of the elasticity of taxable income for South Africa....

Few studies exist on job duration in developing labour markets—an important omission both in our understanding of such markets and for the job duration literature, which is mainly based on developed-country case studies, which differ in structural ways. The main reason for this is likely data constraints in developing countries, since job...

Interest in industrial hemp has revived in the past 20 years. Malawi is considering legalizing the cultivation of industrial hemp as an alternative cash crop to tobacco with great potential. This study considers the potential and challenges of creating an industrial hemp value chain between South Africa and Malawi, with Malawi concentrating on...

There is evidence from developed countries that technical change affects not only the employment intensity of production, but also the occupational composition of employment. The use of artificial intelligence, automation, and robots has changed the skills composition of employment. A range of ‘routine’ tasks are being replaced by machines...

United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), together with its partners, now invites research proposals related to migration for the Southern Africa Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED) programme. Deadline for submissions is 06 April, 2020 23:59 UTC+3.

In 2016, we joined a project in South Africa working to make tax data available for research purposes. Tax authorities collect an enormous amount of data on companies and individuals, data that is useful for economics research and economic policy-making, and the potential to learn from such a large collection of data on the economy is huge.

The success of an economy’s manufacturing sector is often critical to economic growth and development. As a major contributor to exports, site of innovation, adopter of international best practices, and engine of job creation, an internationally competitive manufacturing sector often drives output and employment growth.

Service exports are the fastest growing portion of world trade and now account for nearly a quarter of global exports. Tradable services contribute to economic growth and development by bolstering industrial capabilities, facilitating productivity growth and investment, and contributing directly to exports. This presents opportunities for many...

The design and implementation of industrial policy should be closely linked to spatial considerations. Firm output and productivity are often location-specific, with factors such as the availability of physical infrastructure, proximity to sources for raw materials, and the potential for adopting research-based technology from similar firms...

Countries’ economic complexity, and the associated diversification and sophistication of their exports, is a key determinant of economic growth. Understanding how South African firms learn to export more sophisticated products is, therefore, an important policy issue. Using administrative data covering the entire tax-paying population of firms...

This paper uses detailed firm transaction data on manufactured exports to analyse the dilution of the real exchange rate-export relationship in South Africa over the period 2010 to 2014. Our empirical results show that firms that are larger, have higher export shares in destination markets, and import are more likely to raise the domestic...

This paper uses matched employer-employee data from South Africa to examine the extent to which technology transfers between firms through the hiring of workers. Allowing for differential spillovers based on observable technology differences between sending and receiving firms, we find strong evidence for positive productivity spillovers...

This paper investigates the effect of innovation on employment growth at the firm level in South Africa. Innovation is typically associated with better export performance at the firm level due to productivity enhancements and new products. However, the link between innovation and employment is more ambiguous. R&D targeted towards product...

This working paper is the fourth in a series that forms part of the project ‘Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development’, a three-year partnership between UNU-WIDER and the South African government aimed at generating a better understanding of regional value chains and supporting industrialization in the Southern African...

Using comprehensive, anonymized tax administrative data for the 2008–14 period, we examine firm-level productivity in South Africa. Measures of firm-level productivity are included in a spatial autoregressive model that assesses spillovers from total factor productivity originating from agglomeration economies and the spatial diffusion of...

Economist, and researcher under the work stream on climate change and energy, Faaiqa Hartley was interviewed by Knowable Magazine on her recent SA-TIED working paper Faster than you think: Renewable energy and developing countries.