Primary school mathematics teachers should, at the most basic level, have mastery of the content knowledge that they are required to teach. In this paper we test empirically whether this is the case by analyzing the South African SACMEQ 2007 mathematics teacher test data which tested 401 grade 6...

• Youth unemployment in South Africa is high, differs substantially by race group and is increasing. In 2012, close to two-thirds of young Africans were broadly unemployed. Over the four years prior to this the unemployment rate had increased by almost ten percentage points. • A wage subsidy...

As South African universities experience extremely low graduation rates, academic staff implement a range of interventions, such as tutorial programmes, in order to improve student performance. However, relatively little is known about the impact of such tutorial programmes on students’...

New estimates of GDP of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) suggest that the Cape was one of the most prosperous regions during the eighteenth century. This stands in sharp contrast to the perceived view that the Cape was an “economic and social backwater”, a slave economy with slow growth and...

The aim of this study is to use data from three waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (2008, 2010 and 2012) in order to examine and decompose the dynamics of child poverty over the period. The study is specifically aimed at examining the poverty dynamics of children, as they have been...

One reason for the relatively poor development performance of many countries around the world today may be the high levels of inequality during and after colonisation. Evidence from colonies in the Americas suggests that skewed initial factor endowments could create small elites that owned a...

This note reviews the state and future of South African economic history. We argue that although new techniques, archival sources, international interest and a greater propensity to collaborate within and across disciplines have stimulated new research over the last decade, overcoming our...

The majority of academic research on central bank communication has analysed a central bank’s audience as a single group. Analyses, especially empirical research, have focused almost exclusively on a central bank’s interaction with the financial markets, facilitated by the availability of...

VAT without any exemptions or zero-rating is regressive. Since the inception of VAT in South Africa, there has been an ongoing debate around the issue of zero-rating to alleviate the burden on poor households. This paper uses vegetables as an example and conducts tax incidence analyses to...

What we know about the material culture of eighteenth century Cape Colony settlers is mostly limited to qualitative evidence found in official documents, letters, travel accounts and other correspondence. This paper uses a new quantitative source – the MOOC probate inventories – to ascertain...