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Publications (32)
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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This paper analyses the links between the integration into the international economy and development in Latin America over the past quarter century. It argues that external liberalization led to faster export growth but not to faster GDP or productivity growth. Growth also became more volatile...
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This paper examines the macroeconomic policies and outcomes experienced by the Latin American economies during the period 1990-2010. Macroeconomic policies refer to exchange rates, monetary and aggregate fiscal policies, while macroeconomic outcomes, on the other hand, refer to the patterns of...
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– Honduras, 1991–2007
We examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document first rising inequality between 1991-2005, which...
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– Their Impact on Wage Inequality During the Last Decade
Labour market incomes have been a major contributor to the important fall in inequality in Latin America during the 2000s. Indeed, it was the main contributor in countries where inequality fell more dramatically. A proper understanding of the workings of the labour market is necessary to comprehend...
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– The Equalizing Role of Migration and Remittances in El Salvador
This paper reviews the pattern of poverty rates and income inequality in El Salvador since the 1990s. It discusses some of the likely factors that explain the reduction in income inequality that has taken place in the country in the last decade, which paradoxically has coincided with the long period...
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– Rising and Falling Income Inequality in the 1990s and 2000s
This study examines the rise and fall in income inequality in Ecuador over the past two decades. Falling income equality during the 2000s partly coincides with the rise to power of a ‘new leftist’ government, but the trend was already set early in the decade. The recent trend is mainly associated...
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Inequality in Mexico rose between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2010. We examine the role of market forces (demand and supply of labour by skill), institutional factors (minimum wages and unionization rate), and public policy (cash transfers) in explaining changes in inequality. We...
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– Latin America over 1990-2010
The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which––if continued for another 2-3 years––would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the factors...
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Declining social and economic inequalities since the late 1990s coincided with several basic shifts in Latin America’s political landscape, including an electoral turn to the left and a revival of social mobilization from below. These shifts helped to ‘repoliticize’ inequality and return...
Displaying 16 of 32 results