Working Papers

Sustainable financing of conservation is a key challenge in developing countries, due to competing needs. Increasingly, national parks are expected to undertake local community development - at a time when the conservation mandate and threats to conservation have increased signicantly, while...

This paper introduces a new database for Property Rights, Political and Civil Rights and Political Instability for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the 1880-2010 period. Following the methodology used by Fedderke et al. (2001) and Letete (2015), we compute de jure Property, Political and...

This multi-country analysis studies the food security implications of natural pollinator populations in sub-Saharan Africa, where smallholder farmers rely on wild pollinators in the absence of commercial pollination services. The study specifies daily intake of energy, macro-nutrients, minerals and...

We evaluate the effectiveness of trade policy incentive that promotes the use of imported intermediate inputs. Specifically, we examine the performance differences in firm export outcomes for the beneficiaries relative to the non-beneficiaries to Kenya’s duty exemption scheme on imported inputs...

The purpose of this study is to add to the empirical literature regarding quality of life convergence dynamics. It achieves this by analysing and comparing income and income-independent quality of life (IIQoL) convergence dynamics across South Africa's 234 municipalities for the period 1996-2014...

This paper investigates the effect of exchange rate volatility on employment growth in South Africa, a country that is characterised by high rates of unemployment and relatively high exchange rate volatility. Employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration method over the period...

We measure the financial cycle in South Africa using three different methodologies, consider its main characteristics and examine its relationships with the business cycle and a measure of financial stress. We identify the financial cycle using credit, house prices and equity prices as indicators,...

Intra-household decision-making is a fundamental development issue, particularly so for less-privileged households in developing countries. The current study examines sources of bargaining power that inform financial decision-making processes within co-resident couples and determines how bargaining...

This paper attempts to establish optimal response of monetary policy to output, inflation and asset price volatility in a small open economy, taking into account optimisation behaviour of households and firms. The empirical analysis suggest that monetary policy responds to deviation of interest...