South Africa

COVID-19 gave the world a glimpse of how devastating a pandemic can be to economies and livelihoods. Climate change, given its permanence, would be far more devastating, hence the renewed efforts at the global level to mitigate climate change. South Africa, one of the dirtiest producers in the...

South Africa’s stubbornly low labour utilisation rate is an international outlier and a heavy brake on the ambitions for growth and redistribution published in various strategic policy strategies (National Planning Commission 2013). More immediately, low labour utilisation is a major obstacle to...

South Africa’s exports have lagged behind the rest of the world over recent decades, and this has likely constrained overall economic growth. There are multiple reasons for this disappointing trade performance, including the structure of the country’s export basket (which remains dominated by...

South Africa has since the 1990's actively reformed its corporate tax policy to stimulate investment in various assets and industries. While the investment impact of corporate taxation has been evaluated in various studies, no effort has been made to assess the potential inter-asset distortions due...

South Africa’s fiscal balances have deteriorated significantly over the last decade, while the economy has been recording disappointing economic growth rates even prior to the COVID-19 crisis. In this paper, we estimate a series of equations using the Arellano and Bond (1991) estimator to test how...

South Africa successfully reduced smoking prevalence by substantially increasing tobacco excise tax and therefore real cigarette prices between 1993 and 2010. Tobacco market structure changed in 2010 following the entry of local tobacco companies and the introduction of cheaper cigarette brands...

I apply the bunching methodology to South African administrative tax data over the period from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the responsiveness of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates. I find significant evidence of bunching among the self-employed but no evidence of...

This paper investigates the relationship between the education level of household heads and households’ energy-saving practices at the micro-level in South Africa. It uses the community survey of 2016 as data source. Multilevel logistic models are estimated to account for heterogeneity that...

The numerous diagnostic studies and policy recommendations that exist for South Africa typically focus on microeconomic constraints to growth. Higher potential growth certainly requires structural reforms to boost productivity growth, in particular to allow private competition and investment in...

We study the effect of income receipt in form of Old age pension (OAP) on the prevalence of depressive symptoms using the Centre of Epidemiologic Studies Short Depression Scale (CES-D 10). We exploit the exogeneous age eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate the...