Publications (166)

Monetary policy is believed to have a disproportionate effect on firms, depending on their size. Financially constrained firms with limited access to capital markets are expected to be more sensitive to changes in interest rates; this is characteristic of small firms. This paper empirically...

This paper has three primary objectives. First, it provides a broad overview of the available South African data used to examine gender in the labour market, with specific reference to the South African Revenue Services (SARS) tax data which has recently been made available. Second, the paper...

This paper provides a retrospective assessment of the effects of trade policies on South African manufacturing since the transition to democracy, examining the differences and commonalities in the views of economists in favour of and against an acceleration of trade liberalization. Data from...

This study investigates the effect of real exchange rate volatility on the distribution of income between labour and capital in South Africa. Both symmetric and asymmetric effects are considered. Using quarterly data for 1985:1–2018:3 and local linear projection, we find that the immediate...

The paper examines the incidence and employment impacts of the Employment Tax Incentive, a South African wage subsidy system that is targeted at the employers of low-wage youth. The paper uses a triple differences strategy and survey and administrative data, covering the universe of South...

The availability of anonymized individual tax return data can contribute to a deeper understanding of the drivers behind the high levels of inequality and unemployment in South Africa. In the recent past, researchers have examined either payroll or personal income tax data. This paper explains...

There is general agreement at present that the Southern African Development Community needs to re-imagine itself and breathe new life into its somewhat moribund structure. The European Union is often presented as the textbook example to be followed by other regional associations—a rules-...

Longitudinal surveys can give insight into economic mobility, which allows us to understand how markers of (dis)advantage are consequential in determining material conditions in the present, and how these markers structure economic opportunity over time. In this paper we show that this dynamic...

Differences in the economic lifecycle between countries at different levels of development suggest that there may be differences between sub-populations within countries, particularly where the sub-populations have different levels of income. Given stark inequalities by race in...

This paper investigates the evolution of the gender wage gap in South Africa, using the 1993–2015 Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series data set. The changes in the gap are heterogeneous across the wage distribution. There has been a substantial narrowing of the gap at the bottom of the...

Using SAMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model for South Africa, this paper examines the joint distributional impact of the increase in the value-added tax (VAT) rate and increases in benefit amounts in 2018. Although poverty and inequality did not increase overall, the poorest still saw a...

The problem of debt bias can be tackled through either disincentivizing the use of debt financing or incentivizing the use of equity financing. Considering the South African context—in which many firms are highly leveraged and the marginal effective tax rates for using debt financing are...

This framing paper has two main purposes. We first provide a brief survey of the economic literature on taxation in South Africa. Second, we attempt to offer some ideas about areas and topics on which more information is needed and which are therefore suitable topics for further research....

We synthesize the findings from several recent papers on South Africa’s very high income inequality. These papers use new datasets—including income tax data—and new empirical methods to investigate the drivers of household income and individual earnings inequality in South...

In this paper we explore the income data in two surveys that underpin a South African tax-benefit microsimulation model. The simulated taxes and benefits using each dataset are compared with each other and with administrative data for a common time point. We explore discrepancies between the...