Consideration is given to what the big four South African banks have done since the late nineties to open up their lending facilities to the unbanked, taking cognisance of the trends internationally, finally leading to a conclusion as to the most appropriate strategy for the future. The banks'...

The needs to find ways of lifting people out of poverty and to transform the existing patterns of inequality in South Africa are high on the country’s development agenda. Much hope is often vested in education as an opportunity for children from poor households to overcome the disadvantage of...

An existing accounting framework to describe an education system is elaborated and used as a framework for understanding and comparing the resource allocation policies of the South African and Argentinean schooling systems. The comparison highlights how, by paying fewer teachers more (relative...

In regional context, South African students benefit from above average levels of public and private education resources. However, their performance on international tests – including SACMEQII (Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality, 2000) – is extremely weak. The...

Linkages between the financial and real sectors of the economy have been studied extensively over the past twenty years to enhance business cycle forecasting on the one hand and improve portfolio allocation on the other. The broad aim of the paper is to investigate the relationship between...

This paper examines South African wage earnings trends using all the available post-1994 household survey datasets. This allows us to identify and address the sources of data inconsistencies across surveys in order to construct a more comparable earnings time series. Taking account of the...

Research on income distribution in South Africa has, for obvious reasons, focused on inter-racial (inter-group) income distribution. Quite dramatic changes have occurred in inter-racial income distribution patterns since the 1970s, with the black share of income rising for the first time and at...

This paper estimates a hedonic price function for Stellenbosch wines to determine the association between market value and different characteristics of these wines. In such a hedonic price function, the price of a bottle of wine is ascribed to the implicit value of its attributes. Besides...

An economy's level of potential output plays a central (and critical) role in the formulation of monetary policy focused on maintaining low and stable inflation. Assuming that potential output is determined mainly by the quantity and quality of its productive factors and the level of technology,...

Education is a key determinant of earnings, as several South African studies have confirmed. Years of schooling completed, however, provides an imperfect approximation of the effective level of education achieved, mainly due to variations in the quality of education received. This study...