Soaring real estate prices and valuations despite the economic downturn brought by the pandemic have focussed the attention of Dutch policymakers on potential macro-financial and socio-economic implications. In this context, our paper reviews the salient features of Dutch commercial and...

How does a shrinking population affect the housing market? In this study, drawing on Japan's experience, we find that there exists an asymmetric relationship between housing prices and population change. Due to the durability of housing structures, the decline in housing prices associated with...

This paper applies a state-space approach to estimate the implicit inflation target of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) since the adoption of the Inflation Targeting (IT) framework. The paper's findings are two. First, although the official inflation target range is 3.6 percent, in...

Despite a substantial and prolonged exchange rate depreciation, South Africa's export performance has disappointed since the global financial crisis. In this paper we focus on the role of structural factors in reducing the responsiveness of South African exports to the real exchange rate...

Many low-income countries do not use interest rates as their main monetary policy instrument. In East Africa, for instance, targeting money aggregates has been pretty much the rule rather than the exception. Nevertheless, these targets are seldom met and often readjusted according to the...

Globally, financial institutions have increased their holdings of domestic sovereign debt, tightening the linkage between the health of the financial system and the level of sovereign debt, or the "financial sector-sovereign nexus," during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In South Africa, the...

Cross-border capital flows are important for South Africa. They fund the nation's relatively large external financing needs and have important financial stability implications evidenced by the large capital outflows and asset price selloffs during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper adds to the...