In East Germany, active labour market policies (ALMPs) are used on a large scale to contain fast rising unemployment after unification. This paper evaluates the effects for participants in public employment programmes (PEPs), that are an important part of ALMPs. It focuses on individual...

This paper investigates the direction of temporal causality between budget deficit and interest rate in South Africa using quarterly data for the period of 1961:02 to 2005:04, and also for annual data covering 1961 to 2005. Based on a multivariate Vector Error Correction Model (VECM), estimated...

This paper investigates the direction of causal relationship between taxes and expenditure in South Africa, using quarterly data for the period 1960:1-2006:2, and annual data for 1960 to 2005. For both frequencies, gross domestic product and government debt are included in the VAR system as...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy on house prices in South Africa, before and after financial liberalisation, with financial liberalisation being identified with the recommendations of the De Kock Commission (1985). Using both impulse response and variance...

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...

In order to address practical questions in credit portfolio management it is necessary to link the cyclical or systematic components of firm credit risk with the firm’s own idiosyncratic credit risk as well as the systematic credit risk component of every other exposure in the portfolio. This...

A simple empirical nonlinear framework is used to analyse monetary policy between 1983 and 2007 in South Africa, focusing on the policy of in?ation targeting introduced in Feb 2000, more precisely when the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) announced that an inflation zone targeting regime of...

The persistence property of inflation is an important issue for not only economists, but, especially for central banks, given that the degree of inflation persistence determines the extent to which central banks can control inflation. Also, not only is the level of inflation persistence that is...

This study determines whether the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) approach provides better forecasts of key South African variables than a vector error correction model (VECM) and a Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) model augmented with foreign variables. The paper considers both a small...

This study analyses the effects of public-sector-sponsored continuous vocational training and retraining in East Germany after unification with West Germany in 1990. It presents econometric estimates of the average gains from training participation in terms of employment probabilities, earnings,...