E31

This paper documents the price setting behaviour, and the change in this behaviour, amongst retail firms after the introduction of the new currency system in Zimbabwe. We use sample data which covers 291 products to investigate whether prices became more flexible (rigid) and to track the adjustment...

This paper explores the dynamics of inflation in the dollarised Zimbabwean economy using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) with monthly data from 2009:1 to 2012:12. The main determinants of inflation were found to be the US dollar/South African rand exchange rate, international oil...

We consider the relative empirical performance of a range of inflation models for South Africa. Model coverage is of Phillips-curve, New Keynesian Phillips curve, monetarist, and structural models of inflation. Our core findings are that the single most robust covariate of inflation is unit labour...

This paper develops a new index of economic uncertainty for South Africa for the period 1990-2014 and analyses the macroeconomic impact of changes in this measure. The index is constructed from three sources: (1) Disagreement among professional forecasters about macroeconomic conditions using novel...

Measures of core inflation convey critical information about an economy. They have a direct effect on the policy-making process, particularly in inflation-targeting countries, and are utilized in forecasting and modelling exercises. In South a Africa the prices indices on which inflation is based...

In this paper we investigate the likelihood of a proposed monetary union in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) being successful from the viewpoint of the Generalised Purchasing Power Parity (GPPP) hypothesis and optimum currency area (OCA) theory. We apply Johansen’s multivariate co-...

I study the implications of learning by doing in production for optimal monetary policy using a basic New Keynesian model. Learning-by-doing is modeled as a stock of skills that accumulates based on past employment. The presence of this learning-by-doing externality breaks the ’divine coincidence’...

This paper follows work by Choi, Kim and O’Sullivan (2011), but deviates from their analysis by looking at the relative price variability (RPV) of selected components of the consumer price index (CPI) rather than an aggregate measure. The purpose of this work is to analyse which components are more...

In this paper we investigate the role of inflation rates in determining economic growth in fifteen sub-Saharan African countries, which are all members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), between 1980 and 2009. The results, based on panel time-series data and analysis, suggest...