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Publications (60)
Working Paper
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The ethnic diversity–financial inclusion nexus remains one of the least explored topics in the literature despite global attempts to promote cultural mixing due to its socioeconomic benefits. We contribute to the literature by examining the link between ethnic diversity and financial inclusion using...
Working Paper
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– The role of financial regimes
This paper examines the role of financial frictions in the public debt–growth nexus, documenting that a public debt shock has different macro-financial implications dependent on the state of financial markets in South Africa. A non-linear vector autoregression model is estimated which allows the...
Working Paper
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Extractive industries form an important part of the economy for many developing countries, but their impact on growth and welfare remains understudied. With global efforts to transition to net-zero carbon emissions in the coming decades, understanding the local impacts of the extractives sector is...
Blog
– The power of ideas & the limits of technocracy
What will it take to shake loose the distemper of our times, and initiate a virtuous spiral of renewal? In a recent UNU-WIDER webinar, Alan Hirsch and I explored why a narrow focus on growth and good governance will not be enough to get South Africa (and, by analogy, other countries similarly...
Journal Article
– Rapidly increasing top incomes amid low national growth in South Africa
Despite South Africa’s need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the top income percentiles continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We compare household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey data, includes accurate data for the very rich) to...
Working Paper
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– The role of trade credit
We study the role of trade credit in enhancing the resilience of financially constrained firms from 2010 to 2017. Implicit borrowing in trade finance allows financially constrained firms to bridge the financing gap, expand employment by 8.26 per cent, and increase average firm profits significantly...
Working Paper
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– An impulse response analysis by local projections for South Africa
The aim of this paper is to assess South Africa’s fiscal multiplier across different states of the economy, with a focus on the financial accelerator mechanism of fiscal policy shocks, by estimating impulse response functions from both linear and non-linear local projections. The model finds...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– The top-end, labour markets, fiscal redistribution and the persistence of very high inequality
From the book:
Inequality in the Developing World
Working Paper
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– Firm-level evidence from administrative tax data
This paper uses firm-level data and a news-based measure of economic policy uncertainty to provide empirical evidence that economic policy uncertainty has a negative impact on firm-level investment in South Africa. Firms’ investment decisions in response to uncertainty reflect firms’ heterogeneity...
– Natural gas as a key
Plastics are universal and integrated into different sectors of the economy. Industrial policy requires countries to look at moving up the value chain and producing progressively more sophisticated products to contribute to improved economic development. The input materials that are used for...
Working Paper
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Exchange rate volatility is said to exemplify the economic health of a country. Exchange rate break points (known as structural breaks) have a momentous impact on the macroeconomy of a country. Nonetheless, this country study makes use of both unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms...
Working Paper
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– The case of BRICS
As the world battles with the triple problems of social, economic, and environmental challenges, it has become important to focus both policy and research efforts on these. Therefore, this study examines the effect of wealth inequality on CO2 emissions in five emerging economies: Brazil, Russia...
Monetary policy affects the real economy through various channels, including the interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset price channels. The credit channel has recently received considerable attention. Small firms are more sensitive to changes in interest rates. Small firms which are...
Working Paper
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This paper adds quantitative analysis to the study by Crompton et al. (2020), in which various alternative regulatory arrangements regarding the petrol price in South Africa were explored. We use a multi-sector dynamic computable general equilibrium model for South Africa to conduct our economic...
Working Paper
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Plastics are ubiquitous across the region and play an important role in multiple industries. Most plastic products are based on a value chain that is grounded in petroleum refining, posing an environmental challenge. Plastic manufacturing in South Africa suffers from the high cost of polymers as...
Working Paper
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– Is it meeting its intended objectives?
The South African liquid fuels industry is a significant part of the economy. Historically, government policy focused on import substitution industrialization to support industry margins. This approach is called into question by the 2006 shift from net exports to imports and by inflated downstream...
Displaying 16 of 60 results