Working paper

Tax administration statistics now provide considerably more complete and reliable measures of South African personal income and its distribution than the available household or other survey sources. However, there are difficulties in using tax data...

Globally, corporate cash holdings have risen since the 1980s. In South Africa, some commentators have accused corporations of engaging in an ‘investment strike’, while others see corporate liquidity as a precaution against systemic uncertainty. We...

The paper examines the underlying constraints impacting micro-enterprise growth within South African townships. The understanding broadly provides a finer and more granular understanding of the microeconomic constraints to economic growth and employment generation in South...

Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates, simulating incomes in...

South Africa runs a primary fiscal deficit and the long-term interest rate on government borrowing, r, is greater than the long-term economic growth rate, g. Without intervention, debt will continue to rise until there is...

This paper reviews South Africa’s monetary policy since 2007 and makes recommendations towards improving the inflation-targeting framework currently in place. Following a surge in inflation into double digits in 2007/08, the South African Reserve Bank...

Extractive industries form an important part of the economy for many developing countries, but their impact on growth and welfare remains understudied. With global efforts to transition to net-zero carbon emissions in the coming decades...

This study analyses the performance of macroeconomic policy in South Africa in 2007–2020 and outlines challenges for policy in the coming decade. After remarkable economic growth in 1997–07, South Africa’s progress slowed dramatically in 2009...

This study analyses the potential impact of conservation agriculture (CA) on maize production and food security under drought conditions in southern Africa. The study combines biophysical and socio-economic approaches. The biophysical approach is used to...

An often-neglected potential negative consequence of tariffs is the impact they may have on the misallocation of factor inputs. Trade protection can provide space for domestic firms to increase prices and mark-ups, allowing low-productivity firms...

This paper presents version 4.0 of the CIT-IRP5 firm-level panel dataset. Version 4.0 is the latest edition of the firm-level component of the combined administrative data using sources from the South African Revenue Service. We...

We use a fiscal incidence model based on the South African 2014/15 Living Conditions Survey to simulate the poverty reduction impacts of a selection of medium-to-long-term social grant options with the goal of replacing the...

This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a...

Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the private sector through...

This paper investigates the business environment in sub-Saharan Africa. Previous studies show that the ease of doing business is associated with economic growth as it affects the level of business. This study aims to examine...

Financial inclusion is considered a vehicle to inclusive growth and thus critical in addressing the three key socioeconomic ills of modern society—particularly in Southern Africa: poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Being excluded from the financial services...