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Publications (30)
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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– Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa
In May 2008, South Africa became the theatre of widespread violent attacks against undesirable ‘outsiders’. Over 60 were killed, hundreds wounded, and tens of thousands displaced. This analysis aims at identifying the characteristics of the victims in an attempt to portray the ‘alien’ using...
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This paper investigates whether cyclical variation in women’s labour supply in Africa contributes to smoothing household consumption. We find little support for this hypothesis. Using comparable individual data on about 0.5 million women in 30 Sub-Saharan African countries merged with country level...
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Empirical studies have shown that trade agreements have different effects on countries based on their level of development, especially in trade potentials. There have been several trade agreements between North-South and South-South countries, which are accompanied with different outcomes based on...
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This study revisits the effect of aid on the quality of institutions and examines the effects of a major source of instability, namely terms-of-trade instability, on the quality of democracy. We take advantage of previous empirical findings which explain the role of aid in mitigating the adverse...
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– A case study of Liberia’s telecommunication laws
The telecommunications sector in Africa presents many exciting prospects to international investors—indeed many billion dollar projects are already underway across the continent. Many of the continent’s current problems can be traced to the exploitation it has experienced whilst ‘doing business’...
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Purposeful, well-targeted and successful transformation policies will be elusive for a country or region that does not understand the relative importance of its sectoral sources of growth. This study aims at eliciting our understanding in this respect by providing an assessment of the relative...
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– Growth and Distributional Aspects
The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article specifies government’s stated target of halving poverty...
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– The Case of Africa
Scholars and policy makers believe that democracy will bring prosperity through integration into the global economy via increased international trade. This study tests two theories as to why democracies might trade more. First, political freedom may be correlated with economic freedom, thus...
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– A Comparative Analysis of Domestic and Foreign Banks
Utilizing the stochastic frontier approach, this study conducts a comparative analysis of profit efficiency and cost inefficiency of commercial banks operating in 29 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries by bank ownership (domestic bank, SSA foreign bank or non-SSA foreign bank), as well as by the...
Displaying 16 of 30 results