Image
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
Working paper
South Africa is among the most unequal countries in the world in terms of income with a Gini of 0.65, and land with a Gini of 0.64. Inequality decreased in all provinces except for Limpopo...
March 2021
Working paper
Climate change poses a serious threat to many countries, particularly to developing countries, which often have large sections of the population without resources to adapt to changes in their environment. One of the key ways...
February 2021
Climate and energy
Working paper
Foreign direct investment is recognized as a significant driver of economic development and growth in many economies. It can have a positive effect on a host country’s development and growth efforts. This study seeks to...
January 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
This paper analyses how exchange rate volatility affects domestic consumption. It uses a Bayesian vector autoregression model to measure impulse response, based on South African data from 1990 to 2016, which helps to detect how...
January 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
This study simulates the macro-micro economic impacts of the employment policy, focusing on hysteresis in youth unemployment in South Africa. Specifically, we apply a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to calibrate the 2015 South African...
January 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
This paper estimates the output cost of fighting inflation—the sacrifice ratio—for the South African economy using quarterly data spanning the period 1998Q1–2019Q3. To compute the sacrifice ratio, the structural vector autoregressive model developed by Cecchetti...
January 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
This paper aims to analyse the influence of spillovers into South Africa’s economy from shifts in United States of America’s (US) monetary policy. Often changing, the US interest rate is regarded as an important driving...
January 2021
Macro-fiscal analysis
Working paper
Low-resource public schools in South Africa suffer from a lack of (i) access to home-language reading materials and (ii) teacher capacity on how to teach early-grade reading in African languages. In this context, the Funda...
January 2021
Enterprise development
Labour market and inequality