Working Papers

This study seeks to understand the relationship between the United States imports from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and the overall exports from SSA between 1996 and 2018. It examines the drivers of that relationship drawing from the existing theories of international trade. The study found that the...

We consider the perverse incentive that can be created for poor households that are benefiting from the South African Child Support Grant (CSG). We acknowledge the fact that the CSG has been successful in improving child outcomes. However, if caregivers see the CSG as a livelihood strategy and...

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...

Ndou et al (2019) showed that, in absolute terms, the decline in household consumption due to the monetary policy tightening shocks exceeds the increase in household consumption, following the monetary policy loosening shocks of the same magnitude. This paper applies a counterfactual vector...

This paper explores the fundamental or deep causes of poverty persistence, which remains a central challenge of the modern world. In theory, rising political participation in a democracy operationalises checks on state predation and cultivates development-enabling state capacity. This did not...

Exposure to weather shocks around the time of birth has been shown to have deleterious effects on later life outcomes. In the short run, such shocks can lead to income loss, especially when households are not insured but rely heavily on rainfed agricultural activities. In the long run, however,...

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...

After showing that the bulk of government expenditure is unproductive, we consider the impact of an alternative fiscal policy mix in South Africa. The alternative suggests freezing the real government wage bill for five years and using the savings generated by this decision to increase spending on...

As the result of prohibitively high transaction costs, smallholder farmers are only partly integrated into agricultural and forest commodity markets, a situation that may leave them in a lower level of development equilibrium (i.e., a poverty trap). For the most part, many users of forest commons...