This paper analyses the economic viability of slavery in the Cape Colony of southern Africa. It has been extensively documented that the affluence of elites was built on the importation of slaves. However, the Dutch East India Company or Verengide Oost-indische Companje (VOC), which...

The persistently high unemployment rate has always been one of the most pressing socio-economic problems of the South African economy. There is a general consensus that unemployment is structural, as there is a mismatch between the skills demanded by employers for the available jobs and the...

The National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), introduced since 2008, has become an alternative data source for the South African poverty and inequality analyses. In addition to the fact that NIDS is the first national panel study of individuals in South Africa, it is also the only survey that...

Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) has been collecting labour market data with household surveys and in a fairly comparable format since 1993. These datasets have been studied and compared extensively in order to better understand the workings of the South African labour market. Many of these...

In order to evaluate the extent to which a country achieves the objectives of poverty and inequality reduction, up-to-date, reliable and comparable survey data is required. This paper critically reviews the factors which could affect the comparability and reliability of poverty estimates and...

One of the most pressing socio-economic problems of the South African economy is high youth unemployment. Recent studies only briefly examined how the youths fared since the transition by comparing the 1995 October Household Survey (OHS) with a Labour Force Survey (LFS), and hardly investigated...

This paper analyses trends in hours worked from South African household survey data for the period 1997 – 2011. The purpose of the paper is fourfold. First, the paper provides an overview on the trends in hours worked of formal sector employees, by various demographic and work characteristics....

This paper studies the effectiveness of countercyclical capital requirements and contingent convertible capital (CoCos) in limiting financial instability, and its associated influence on the real economy. To do this, I augment both features into a standard real business cycle framework with an...