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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
Working paper
This study investigates the impacts of public expenditure innovations on exchange rate volatility in South Africa using quarterly data for the period 1970–2019. To achieve this objective, a version of the vector autoregressive impulse response...
May 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
The Paris Agreement calls for a reduction in global emissions to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2oC (above preindustrial levels), while pursuing the means to limit the increase to 1.5oC. This...
May 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
This paper simulates the long-term implications of skilled labour emigration for South Africa, using a recursive dynamic general equilibrium framework. It examines the effects of skilled emigration with or without offsetting measures, specifically the projected...
April 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
Public debt is defined as the total amount owed by the government. It is calculated as the total amount of international and local debts of the nation. Since the 2008 financial crisis, public debt has...
April 2021
Phase 1 regional growth
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...
April 2021
Phase 1 regional growth
Working paper
This paper explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa.
April 2021
Public revenue
Working paper
This paper uses firm-level data and a news-based measure of economic policy uncertainty to provide empirical evidence that economic policy uncertainty has a negative impact on firm-level investment in South Africa.
March 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy measures on livelihoods in urban South Africa. Using qualitative research methods, we analyse two rounds of semi-structured phone interviews, conducted between June and...
March 2021
Labour market and inequality
Working paper
Assessing pension-related tax expenditures in South Africa: Evidence from the 2016 retirement reform
In 2016, the South African government introduced a comprehensive reform to simplify and harmonize the pension system in order to incentivize pension savings and increase the fairness of the retirement system. Using administrative tax micro-data...
March 2021
Public revenue
Working paper
This paper aims to decompose the sources of growth in economies in the Southern African region’s Common Monetary Area and in the provinces of South Africa.
February 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
Despite recent progress, energy poverty remains pervasive in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This challenge is generally more severe in rural areas. However, rapid urbanization adds a significant challenge to often under-capacitated urban local authorities that struggle...
February 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
This study considers how household composition influences the leisure time of men and women in South Africa, using the South African 2010 Time Use Survey. Studying leisure time is important since the allocation of time...
February 2021
Labour market and inequality