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Publications (26)
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from South African tax registers
Part of Journal Special Issue
Public economics and development action
Working Paper
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The South African Revenue Service and National Treasury Firm-Level Panel is an unbalanced panel data set created by merging several sources of administrative tax data received during 2015. The four data sources that constitute the panel are: company income tax from registered firms who submit tax...
Working Paper
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The manufacturing sector is an important source of productivity growth and exports. Manufacturing firms are generally more productive than firms in the agricultural or services sectors and are an important source of job creation. Little is known about the productivity performance of the sector and...
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– An analysis with administrative data
This paper uses newly available firm-level tax data to evaluate the market structure in South African manufacturing sectors in the period 2010–12. To describe the market structure we compute markups for South African manufacturing firms and concentration indexes for 4-digit manufacturing sectors. We...
Working Paper
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– New evidence from South Africa
This paper uses firm-level data from company tax declarations to analyse the complementary relationship between direct access to imported intermediate inputs and manufacturing firm performance in South Africa. There are three main findings. The first is on firm heterogeneity, showing that importers...
Working Paper
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Existing South African work on firm-level data has been limited by access to large datasets that track firms over time. This paper overcomes this by analysing a new dataset of the population of manufacturing firms that are matched to their export transactions. South African firm-level exporting is...
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In this paper, worker and job flows are estimated using the IRP5 data from the South African Revenue Services. The data used in this paper is from the 2011–14 tax years and contains information on more than 12 million individuals and nearly 300,000 firms. The main finding of the paper is that worker...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from South African tax registers
In this paper we study the effects of various tax schedule discontinuities on the behavior of small firms using high-quality and population-wide tax register data from South Africa. We use the bunching method to analyse how these discontinuities affect the firm-size distribution. We first examine...
Working Paper
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– The British IT Consulting Industry as a Contemporary Specimen
The Internet is often anticipated to have disruptive competitive impacts, causing upstart firms to overthrow incumbent market leaders. This paper uses the UK IT consulting industry as a test case to see whether such competitive impacts of the Internet might already be occurring. Comparable possible...
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– Technology, Policy, People, and Strategies
This study explores the on-going development of a global digital economy through a case-study analysis of its impact on and prospects in South Africa. It argues that four factors are key to understanding the impact of the digital economy on a developing country: (i) the level of technology...
Working Paper
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The rapid development and diffusion of the information and communications technology (ICT) is the major driving force of the New Economy. While there is ample evidence to suggest that the ICT industry has contributed a great deal to the overall economic growth of the developed countries, its role in...
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The core industries of the new information economy are characterized by imperfect competition, asymmetric information or external effects. Thus, well-designed microeconomic policies, in the form of competition policies, technology policies or combinations of these, have strong potential of...
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This paper assesses the contribution of software to India's economic development, paying particular attention to the role of software in the absorption of labour and the development of human capital in the economy. India's specialization in software has been driven by two sorts of wage advantages...
Working Paper
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This paper investigates the factors which determine the diffusion of the Internet across countries. The Gompertz model of technology diffusion is estimated using data on Internet hosts per capita for the years 1995-2000. For a sample of the 0ECD countries, the basic finding is that GDP per capita...
Working Paper
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– Digital Dividends or Digital Divide?
This paper examines the empirical evidence to determine whether Asian countries, despite having captured a disproportionately high share of global production of ICT goods, have as a group been laggard in the adoption of ICT in comparison to non-Asian countries. Using regression analysis, it is shown...
Working Paper
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– the Great Central Banana and the Small Nordic Potato
We analyse the clustering of European ICT activities. Our focus is primarily on the ICT manufacturing industries in the EU countries. We find a clear and intensifying concentration tendency of ICT-related production and R&D. As a rule, originally specialized countries have become more so. In terms...
Displaying 16 of 26 results