South Africa

Previous studies on the J–curve phenomenon for South Africa have been carried out using either aggregate trade data between South Africa and the rest of the world or between South Africa and her major trading partners. The evidence of J-curve effects in South Africa's bilateral trade have been mixed. In this paper, we revisit this issue by examining the short- and long-run effects of exchange rate changes on trade flows in the context of disaggregated industry data on bilateral trade between South Africa and the United States.

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.

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 1995Q3 to 2015Q2 and using a variety of specifications, results show that real exchange rate volatility has a significant contractionary effect on manufacturing employment growth.

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).