Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (133)
Working Paper
pdf
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
pdf
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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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
pdf
– 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
pdf
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...
Working Paper
pdf
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
pdf
– 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
pdf
– Views from Africa
Although development generally refers to a broad concept, the quest for development in Sub-Saharan Africa has been biased by ideological considerations which made abstraction of local conditions and people’s aspirations. The prevalent development models have used increased national income as a...
Working Paper
pdf
Over the past decade, Africa has been experiencing an economic resurgence. Yet, the continent is facing several difficult challenges and many economies of the region continue to be among the least competitive in the world. Africa’s competitiveness is adversely affected by: (i) poor regional...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Missing Evidence from Luminosity Data
The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the empirical literature by assessing the effects of...
Working Paper
pdf
Marriage is the single most important economic transaction and social transition in the lives of young people. Yet little is known about the economics of marriage in much of the developing world. This paper examines the economics of marriage in North Africa, where asymmetric rights in marriage...
Working Paper
pdf
A sustainable pathway for Africa in the twenty-first century is laid out in the setting of the development of innovation capabilities and the capture of latecomer advantages. Africa has missed out on these possibilities in the twentieth century while seeing the East Asian countries advance. There...
Working Paper
pdf
Africa’s improved growth performance over the last 15 years provides an opportunity for the continent to transit from recovery to structural transformation. This paper reviews the evolution of development theory and practice, the role of agriculture therein, and the pace of structural transformation...
Working Paper
pdf
Economics has rediscovered happiness even though the discipline has always been about human wellbeing. A growing evidence suggests that happier people can be more productive and innovative, which leads to profitability and economic growth. Thus, there are concerted efforts to measure happiness and...
Working Paper
pdf
Countries need capacity for a variety of reasons, including sustaining economic growth, generating jobs, reducing poverty, effectively managing development programmes, and transforming societies and economies. A lot of effort has been expended to develop capacity in Africa with mixed results. This...
Working Paper
pdf
Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early 1990s coincided with the start of a new era of...
Displaying 16 of 133 results