South Africa

Since Marshall's (1890) work on industrial districts in 19^{th} century England, agglomeration economies are credited for providing the needed catalytic role to economic growth and development. It does this by allowing critical masses, where knowledge spillovers among firms; labour market pooling;...

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...

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...

The health consequences of smoking are serious and have been frequently detailed. A reduction in tobacco-related mortality hinges upon the ability to reduce tobacco usage. There is overwhelming evidence that higher cigarette prices reduce cigarettes demand, but little is known about the combined...

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...

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...

Does ethnic favouritism in administrative governments affect public infrastructure provision? While previous literature has studied the effects of ethnic favouritism on economic growth and development determinants, there has been limited empirical evidence on ethnic favouritism in public...

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...

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...