South Africa

There is increasing concern regarding obesity related healthcare costs in South Africa. Obesity is also seen to have far reaching effects that seep into labour market outcomes (Barnett & Kumar, 2009). Using NIDS panel data, this study aims to examine the relationship between Body Mass Index and employment status as well as wage levels. This is done using a probit and tobit model and thereafter a system GMM model to take endogeneity into account.

The problem of sample selection complicates the process of drawing inference about populations. Selective sampling arises in many real world situations when agents such as doctors and customs officials search for targets with high values of a characteristic. We propose a new method for estimating population characteristics from these types of selected samples. We develop a model that captures key features of the agent's sampling decision.

Two neighbouring republics, with a common history and culture, followed very different paths of development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Extraordinary mineral wealth was discovered during this period in the South African Republic (ZAR), the neighbour where political and economic stability was fragile compared with the Republic of the Orange Free State (OFS).

The main purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis of the rebound effect for the South African case in the years between 1990 to 2014 by firstly, decomposing the driving forces of the changes in CO2 emissions of the country and secondly, comparing with the behaviors of other emerging economies such as BRICS.

This article investigates the competitiveness of the South African wheat industry and compares it to its major trade partners. Since 1997, the wheat-to-bread value chain has been characterised by concentration of ownership and regulation. This led to concerns that the local wheat market is losing international competitiveness. The competitive status of the wheat industry, and its sub-sectors, is determined through the estimation of the relative trade advantage (RTA). The results revealed declining competitiveness of local wheat producers.

This paper hypothesises that the saving rate and technological progress are interdependently determined by a common exogenous source, so that an exogenous shock to the saving rate determines long-run growth transitions. In an open economy, the saving rate measures the quality of capital investment.

Very little income or wage data was systematically recorded on the living standards of South Africa’s black majority during much of the twentieth century. Between 1911 and 1996, for example, only fragmentary evidence of black living standards remain in mining reports and manufacturing censuses, often at a too generalised level or of too short time-span to render any meaningful unbiased, long-run interpretations of living standards. This paper uses three new datasets to document, for the first time, the stature of black South Africans over the course of the twentieth century.

This paper investigates the causal relationship between electricity supply and economic growth in South Africa using annual data covering the period between 1985 and 2014. This paper used a multivariate framework which included trade openness, electricity price, capital and employment as intermittent variables. The ARDL bound testing was employed to establish the long run relationship between these variables. The Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) was estimated to carry out the test of causality. The results support the existence of co-integration among the variables.