This essay is a comparison study of traditional Neoclassical growth theory and new growth theory. It also discusses growth theory in the real world by investigating the so called “growth miracles” and “growth disasters” scenarios in the developing world. Finally, the essay performs a...

Objective: This study provides information regarding trends in alcohol consumption at the household level in South Africa using two datasets. These two datasets, from 1995 and 2000, are the basis of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in South Africa, although they contain information on alcoholic...

Tobacco control policies have effectively raised the price of cigarettes and other tobacco products. However, these price increases have been shown to disproportionately fall upon poorer households, with fewer resources. In this analysis, we provide an initial indication of the effect increased...

Estimates of participation or expenditure elasticities depend upon the assumptions made regarding the observation of zero expenditure at the household level. This research examines two single-hurdle models across two commodities for which nearly two-thirds of the observations are zero. The...

Empirical evidence on the effect of defense spending on US output is at best mixed. Against this backdrop, this paper assesses the impact of a positive defense spending shock on the growth rate of real GNP using a FAVAR model estimated with 116 variables spanning the quarterly period of 1976:01...

This paper examines the causal relationship between exports and growth in nine provinces of South Africa for the period 1995-2011, using panel causality analysis, which accounts for cross-section dependency and heterogeneity across regions. Our empirical results support unidirectional causality...

There exists a huge international literature on the, so-called, Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which in turn, postulates an inverted u-shaped relationship between environmental pollutants and output. The empirical literature on EKC has mainly used test for cointegration, based on...

This paper explores the quantile treatment effects of proximity to a landfill site on housing values in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropole (NMBM), South Africa, extending the research by Du Preez and Lottering (2009) who found a negative relationship to exist between proximity to a landfill site...

This paper investigates the asymmetric and nonlinear transmission of financial and energy prices to US five-year financial CDS sector index spreads for the banking, financial services and insurance sectors in the short- and long-run over the recent periods including the world financial crisis....

Given the existence of non-normality and nonlinearity in the data generating process of real house price returns over the period of 1831-2013, this paper compares the ability of various univariate copula models, relative to standard benchmarks (naive and autoregressive models) in forecasting...