The paper examines how much governance matters for long run economic development in poor countries. Answering this question confronts four methodological challenges. First, since growth equations are likely to be underspecified, unobserved effects are likely to render standard estimators biased...

The South African labor market has been characterized by high and persistent levels of unemployment, and a poor capacity to create jobs. This paper examines existing evidence on what rigidities have generated this outcome. Pricing power in output markets, as well as labor supply and demand side...

This paper investigates the extent of the mark-up of the South African manufacturing sector, taking into account a number of characteristics of its component industries. We find significant mark-ups to be present in the South African manufacturing industry. In comparative terms, the mark-up is...

This paper examines household income inequality in the South African October Household Survey datasets between 1995 and 1999, the Labour Force Survey 2000, and the Income and Expenditure Surveys 1995 and 2000. The paper reflects both on changing patterns of income inequality in South Africa, and...

Recent cross country growth studies have found that ethnolinguistic fractionalization is an important explanatory variable of long-run growth performance. This paper highlights some limitations of cross country studies by focusing on the time series evidence for South Africa. In presenting...

The paper examines whether endogenous growth processes can be found in middle income country contexts. Estimation proceeds by means of dynamic heterogeneous panel analysis. Empirical evidence finds in favour of positive impacts on total factor productivty growth by Schumpeterian innovative...

This paper researches the change in regional specialisation and industry concentration in South African (SA) manufacturing 1970-96, and evaluates possible determinants of industry location. No evident trend towards greater regional specialisation or despecialisation emerges over most of the...

Economic theory in the context of floating exchange rates has focussed on underlying medium and long term direction of exchange rate movements. Daily volatility is less well understood. One theory that offers an explanation for short term exchange rate movements is that of the efficient market...

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...

The paper uses a 52-country panel-data for the period 1980-2002 to estimate demand for electricity and telecom services and, based on these estimates, project investment needs in South Africa through 2010 for two growth scenarios. Projections of average annual investment needs in electricity and...