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Working paper
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...
March 2020
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Climate and energy
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Climate and energy
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Climate and energy
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Climate and energy
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
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...
March 2020
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
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...
February 2020
Enterprise development
Working paper
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...
February 2020
Enterprise development
Working paper
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...
February 2020
Enterprise development
Working paper
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...
January 2020
Enterprise development
Working paper
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...
January 2020
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
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...
January 2020
Enterprise development