Earnings growth in South Africa displayed a U-shaped pattern across the earnings percentiles between 2000 and 2015, resembling wage polarization in the industrialized world. We investigate whether the drivers of this example of wage polarization in an emerging economy resemble those explored for...

Stunted growth in early life has serious implications for children and is a wellestablished constraint to productivity, life expectancy, and cognitive development. This paper evaluates the relative contributions of household resources and public service delivery in reducing the orphan-stunting...

This study considers how household composition influences the leisure time of men and women in South Africa, using the South African 2010 Time Use Survey. Studying leisure time is important since the allocation of time outside the market provides insights into market behaviour and physical and...

This study analyses the performance of macroeconomic policy in South Africa in 2007- 2020 and outlines challenges for policy in the coming decade. After remarkable economic growth in 1997-07, South Africa's progress slowed dramatically in 2009 with the global financial crisis. Real GDP growth...

South Africa has exhibited tepid economic growth over the past twenty years as well as high levels of income inequality characteristic of a middle income country growth trap. This paper compares and contrasts South Africa's growth trap relative to middle-income peer economies. In addition, we...

Few studies exist on job duration in developing labour markets - an important omission both in our understanding of such markets and for the job duration literature, which is mainly based on developed-country case studies, which differ in structural ways. The main reason for this is likely data...

This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of how firms in emerging economies respond to carbon taxation, leveraging detailed administrative data from South Africa-a potential trailblazer for other developing countries with limited state capacity amid the growing global push for carbon...

The proposition that inflation expectations can be extracted as inflation predictions from the government bond yield curve has been tested, with partially positive results, using data from the United States and European countries. Despite the abundance of empirical studies of the proposition,...

This paper estimates the returns to education and their implications for wage inequality using data from the 2015/16 Namibia Income and Expenditure Survey. The paper employs recentred influence function regression to analyse the impact of education across the wage distribution and uses a...

The micro-macro paradox has been revived. Despite broadly positive evaluations at the micro and meso-levels, recent literature doubts the ability of foreign aid to foster economic growth and development. This paper assesses the aid-growth literature and, taking inspiration from the program...