South Africa

This study aims to scrutinize the responsiveness of the South African tax system to changes in economic performance. The study made use of annual time series data spanning from 1995 – 2017. The tax system was found to be fairly buoyant, albeit there is still room for improvement. The ARDL bounds...

For the period 1975 - 2016, this paper examines the determinants of the residential demand for electricity in South Africa including disposable income, electricity prices, food prices as well as the impact of the 2007/08 load-shedding wave and the 2008 electricity price restructuring. Given the...

The yield spread of South African to United States 10 year government bonds over the last 5 years has increased substantially to levels approaching those last seen during the mid-1980s. This yield spread increase is replicated in spreads relative to long-term German bonds, as well as for the spread...

This paper assesses the effect of US monetary policy on South Africa during the period 1990- 2018. We separately analyse and compare the effect of conventional monetary policy, before the Global Financial Crisis, and unconventional monetary policy, after the US monetary policy reached the zero-...

Since Marshall's (1890) work on industrial districts in 19^{th} century England, agglomeration economies are credited for providing the needed catalytic role to economic growth and development. It does this by allowing critical masses, where knowledge spillovers among firms; labour market pooling;...

This paper develops a new index of financial market stress for South Africa (SAFSI) over the period 1995-2017, that has the advantage of capturing the interconnectedness of financial markets as well as enabling each indicator to be assessed in terms of its systemic importance. The index represents...

We investigate spatial dependence of per capita property tax income among South African municipalities. One original contribution of our study is the use of per capita property tax income, rather than the property tax rate, as the outcome variable. Per capita property tax income is indicative of...

The health consequences of smoking are serious and have been frequently detailed. A reduction in tobacco-related mortality hinges upon the ability to reduce tobacco usage. There is overwhelming evidence that higher cigarette prices reduce cigarettes demand, but little is known about the combined...

Policymakers need better information regarding wellbeing inequality to ascertain the contributing factors and to determine whether policy has been successful in improving the spread over time. In this paper, we construct a multidimensional composite wellbeing measure, at a micro level, which...

This paper analyses the evolution of the monetary policy stance, communication and credibility of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) since 2000, when it adopted a flexible Inflation Targeting (IT) regime to facilitate the achievement of its price stability mandate. Empirical results indicate...