Working Papers

This study aims to scrutinize the responsiveness of the South African tax system to changes in economic performance. The study made use of annual time series data spanning from 1995 – 2017. The tax system was found to be fairly buoyant, albeit there is still room for improvement. The ARDL bounds...

Ndou et al (2019) showed that, in absolute terms, the decline in household consumption due to the monetary policy tightening shocks exceeds the increase in household consumption, following the monetary policy loosening shocks of the same magnitude. This paper applies a counterfactual vector...

For the period 1975 - 2016, this paper examines the determinants of the residential demand for electricity in South Africa including disposable income, electricity prices, food prices as well as the impact of the 2007/08 load-shedding wave and the 2008 electricity price restructuring. Given the...

This paper explores the fundamental or deep causes of poverty persistence, which remains a central challenge of the modern world. In theory, rising political participation in a democracy operationalises checks on state predation and cultivates development-enabling state capacity. This did not...

Exposure to weather shocks around the time of birth has been shown to have deleterious effects on later life outcomes. In the short run, such shocks can lead to income loss, especially when households are not insured but rely heavily on rainfed agricultural activities. In the long run, however,...

The yield spread of South African to United States 10 year government bonds over the last 5 years has increased substantially to levels approaching those last seen during the mid-1980s. This yield spread increase is replicated in spreads relative to long-term German bonds, as well as for the spread...

After showing that the bulk of government expenditure is unproductive, we consider the impact of an alternative fiscal policy mix in South Africa. The alternative suggests freezing the real government wage bill for five years and using the savings generated by this decision to increase spending on...

As the result of prohibitively high transaction costs, smallholder farmers are only partly integrated into agricultural and forest commodity markets, a situation that may leave them in a lower level of development equilibrium (i.e., a poverty trap). For the most part, many users of forest commons...

This paper reports a study done on Cape Town consumers, with the aim to understand how their purchasing decisions are shaped with respect to GMOs. A choice experiment approach was used to examine consumer preferences for biotechnology products in the food market. Four models were run to analyse the...

We study targeted lockdowns in a multi-group SIR model where infection, hospitalization and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular between the “young”,“the middle-aged” and the “old”. Our model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy. For baseline parameter values for...