South Africa

This paper develops a new index of financial market stress for South Africa (SAFSI) over the period 1995-2017, that has the advantage of capturing the interconnectedness of financial markets as well as enabling each indicator to be assessed in terms of its systemic importance. The index represents a technical improvement over past measures as it is comprised of financial indicators that have been selected based on their ability to capture key periods of financial stress in the economy.

We investigate spatial dependence of per capita property tax income among South African municipalities. One original contribution of our study is the use of per capita property tax income, rather than the property tax rate, as the outcome variable. Per capita property tax income is indicative of tax burden on residents. In addition, whilst most studies focus on advanced countries that have had institutionalised fiscal decentralisation for many decades, this paper focuses on South Africa, which is a developing country and implemented fiscal decentralisation only 18 years ago.

Policymakers need better information regarding wellbeing inequality to ascertain the contributing factors and to determine whether policy has been successful in improving the spread over time. In this paper, we construct a multidimensional composite wellbeing measure, at a micro level, which includes “economic and non-economic” and “objective and subjective measures” of wellbeing. We use NIDS data spanning the period 2008 – 2015. We compare the results on measuring wellbeing inequality using the composite index and income.

This paper analyses the evolution of the monetary policy stance, communication and credibility of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) since 2000, when it adopted a flexible Inflation Targeting (IT) regime to facilitate the achievement of its price stability mandate. Empirical results indicate that the stance became accommodative after the global financial crisis of 2009, with a tendency of the implicit inflation target to increase, while after 2014 it turned tighter and the implicit target started declining.

The majority of African states continue to be regarded as extractive states. We use the Cape Colony's public expenditure to account for the emergence of extractive states in Africa. With a sub-imperial role for Southern African colonial expansion, the Cape Colony became a template for extractive practices that continue to characterize the region. Using public expenditure data, budget debates and existing historiography, we trace the elite competition for limited public resources that associated the Cape's transition from an agrarian society to a mining-led economy.

Background: Since the early 1980s, many governments have investigated the possibility of utilising access to microloans as a pathway to grow economies out of unemployment and thereby improve people's quality of life. Studies that have previously investigated the impact of microloans found a positive relationship to quality of life. Unfortunately, these studies mainly measure quality of life using monetary (income) measures rather than assessing the entire multidimensionality of quality of life.

Quality of life (QoL) is now widely recognised as a multidimensional concept. This study validates an instrument to measure multidimensional QoL, and investigates the relationships between the domains thereof. The domains analysed are: health, housing and infrastructure, socio-economic status, social relationships, governance and safety. We utilise a rich household-level dataset collected by the GCRO on QoL in the Gauteng city-region of South Africa.