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Working paper
COVID-19 has created a trade crisis in Southern Africa, with a dramatic slowdown in cross-border trade. The crisis, which exposed weaknesses and deficiencies in the trade facilitation regimes, presents an opportunity for the African Continental...
July 2021
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
The paper adopts the SMART partial equilibrium model to simulate the impact of a full tariff liberalization as proposed under the African Continental Free Trade Area on South African agriculture. The results of the model...
July 2021
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
Enterprise development, especially expansion into export markets, is essential to create employment and unlock growth potential in many economies, including in sub-Saharan Africa. However, both firm and product survival (mainly in the export market) is...
July 2021
Enterprise development
Working paper
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become common across Southern Africa in the past 20 years. In line with experiences in the rest of the world, they have had at best marginal success. Their essential premise...
July 2021
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
We present new evidence on the effects of South Africa’s Employment Tax Incentive (ETI), a hiring and employment wage subsidy aimed at reducing youth unemployment. We show that attempts to estimate firm-level treatment effects via...
July 2021
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
In this paper we explore South Africa’s personal income tax system using two microsimulation models. The first, SAMOD, simulates personal income tax and social benefits using a dataset derived from the nationally representative National Income...
July 2021
Public revenue
Working paper
There is a large literature on the minimum wage focused on directly exposed firms and geographies. This paper provides new evidence that the minimum wage has significant spillover effects on firms exposed to the minimum...
June 2021
Enterprise development
Working paper
The demand for livestock-derived foods has steadily grown over the past decades and rising incomes and human populations are expected to see demand further increase. It is unclear if current livestock feed resources are adequately...
June 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
Substance abuse is a significant public concern for global society. Using the National Income Dynamic Study wave four data, this study applies the multinomial endogenous switching regression technique to examine the impact of substance use...
March 2021
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
Analyses for water infrastructure investment planning must consider the interdependencies of local and regional water, energy, food, and environmental systems. This highly complex decision problem requires decision support tools to objectively determine the multi-sector economic...
May 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
The WHAT-IF model was applied to Southern Africa to investigate the impact of climate change and variability on water infrastructure investment planning for the Zambezi River Basin. Zambezi water investment decisions are linked with the...
May 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and inequality generated in the labour market is a key driver of inequality. In this paper, I use the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, the General Household...
May 2021
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
This study employs an autoregressive distributed lag model to investigate the long-run and short-run economic growth impacts of the public service wage bill in South Africa. The annual time series data used ranges from 1983...
May 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
We study the role of trade credit in enhancing the resilience of financially constrained firms from 2010 to 2017. Implicit borrowing in trade finance allows financially constrained firms to bridge the financing gap, expand employment...
May 2021
Enterprise development
Working paper
The aim of this paper is to assess South Africa’s fiscal multiplier across different states of the economy, with a focus on the financial accelerator mechanism of fiscal policy shocks, by estimating impulse response functions...
May 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
This study applies multiple correspondence analysis to construct and compare women’s empowerment indices across selected Southern African countries: Lesotho, Malawi, and Zimbabwe. It also investigates the relative importance of four domains of women’s empowerment in...
May 2021