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Much of the research on fiscal multipliers has used reduced form modelling approaches. While these models have been extended to include richer controls and identification approaches, it remains unclear whether shocks identified capture the true structural shocks. An alternative way to identify...
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e. the output response following an exogenous shock to fiscal policy) has been heatedly debated at the theoretical and...
This paper aims at providing new evidence over the effect of conventional monetary policy shocks on wage inequality through the earnings heterogeneity channel under the inflation-targeting regime implemented in South Africa since 2000. The empirical contribution follows previous studies by...
This paper reviews comparative approaches to key issues in economic regulation in four countries of the Southern African Development Community, and how this has been reflected in outcomes in terms of competition, prices, access, and innovation in telecommunications services. In this paper,...
Low levels of broadband penetration combined with poor quality of services present a challenge to growth and development in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). This paper performs a comparative analysis of the competitive dynamics of telecommunications markets in four SADC...
Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine the short-term impact of strengthening...
The author applies the bunching methodology to South African administrative tax data over the period from 2011 to 2017 to investigate the responsiveness of individual taxpayers to changes in marginal personal income tax rates. She finds significant evidence of bunching among the self-employed...
South Africa’s COVID-19 lockdown regulations are likely to have a devastating impact on the incomes of workers and their dependents. Already disadvantaged groups will suffer disproportionately from the adverse effects. Low-income earners performing jobs in precarious, informal sectors of...
While growing up, I was troubled by the scale of the socioeconomic gap between the haves and the have-nots in the community around me. I saw cases where some individuals and households could afford education, quality healthcare, nice houses, nutritious food and good clothing, while others lived...
The existing sources of demographic data for South Africa have different strengths and limitations that make them inadequate for calibration of sample weights in post-apartheid South African household surveys. The official mid-year population estimates produced by Statistics South Africa do...
The objective of this research is to assess the extent to which export processing zones in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe integrate the Sustainable Development Goals in their implementation and operations. We focused on four Sustainable Development Goals—gender equality, decent...
The IRP5 and IT3(a) tax data from the South African Revenue Service have been made available to researchers through a joint project between the South African Revenue Service, the National Treasury, and UNU-WIDER. In this paper, I explain how to use these data to correctly identify labour...
Special economic zones (SEZs) in Africa are generally regarded as underperforming relative to their peers in the rest of the world. This study focuses on the design features of the SEZ in Africa that may help explain this underperformance. Literature was reviewed to identify the key design...
The principal contribution of this paper is to investigate the relationship between policy uncertainty, caused by recent developments in international markets, and firms’ trade margins for the largest economy in Africa: South Africa. In particular, using a unique database on the population...
The purpose of this research is to investigate whether transport accessibility influences the employment duration of individuals in South Africa. The South African Revenue Service’s IRP5 administration datasets, which indicate employment duration and spatial location data (where workers...
Earnings growth in South Africa displayed a U-shaped pattern across the earnings percentiles between 2000 and 2015, resembling wage polarization in the industrialized world. We investigate whether the drivers of this example of wage polarization in an emerging economy resemble those explored...