Working Papers

We study how taxes and alternative higher education subsidies affect equity-efficiency trade-off for countries at different phases of higher education development. We find a scholarship program is the most efficient higher-education-subsidy program at all stages of higher education development due...

This paper estimates a New Keynesian Wage Phillips Curve for South Africa to investigate the responsiveness of nominal wages to labour market conditions. The estimation is based on a model with staggered nominal wages setting, where all variations in hired labour input is taking place at the...

Industrialisation is recognised as important for developing countries’ growth and ‘catching up’ with advanced economies, but is also associated with harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and hence with climate change. This poses a challenge to sustainable development, particularly for late...

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 paper introduces voluntary social distancing to the canonical epidemiology model, integrated into a conventional macroeconomic model. The model is extended to include treatment, vaccination, and government-enforced lockdown. Infection-averse individuals face a trade-off between a costly social...

Energy poverty is a major concern in most of developing countries while its measurement has not been fully addressed due to the complexity of energy basic needs estimation. This study contributes to the literature by measuring energy poverty with focus on household required energy consumption using...

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...

This paper develops a small open-economy (SOE) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to evaluate the effect of the temporary emergency purchases of government bonds by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) during 2020. The model is constructed in the portfolio balancing framework, in...

This paper considers the sensitivity of Genetic Matching (GenMatch) to the choice of balance measure. It explores the performance of a newly introduced distributional balance measure that is similar to the KS test but is more evenly sensitive to imbalance across the support. This measure is...

This study estimates the price and income elasticity coefficients of domestic South African electricity demand for the period 1980 to 2018, considering both the aggregate economy as well as the mining sector in isolation. South African electricity prices were falling in real terms between 1983–2005...