The paper provides an evaluation of the development of the South African economy since the end of apartheid in 1994. Taking the 1993 situation as the point of departure, it gives an account of the path leading to the formulation of the major policy documents, and examines to what extent their...

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s which resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994-95 Mexican crises, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian...

Teenage motherhood is very high in South Africa. In 2001, 55 per thousand African South African women and 82 per thousand Coloured South African women were teenage mothers as compared to 8 among Indian South Africans and 3 among White South African women. In this paper we use the South African...

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of sectoral wage laws in South Africa. Specifically, we examine the impact of minimum wage laws promulgated in the Retail, Domestic work, Forestry, Security, and Taxi sectors using 15 waves of biannual Labour Force Survey data for the 2000-2007...

A growing body of literature shows that child health has substantial long-term economic impacts. This study examines whether, and to what extent, increased access to health infrastructure leads to better child health status as measured by weight-for-age z-scores. To assess the causal...

Current research into the pattern of energy usage in South Africa reveals an extraordinarily heavy reliance on coal-fired electricity, a strategy that is not only unsustainable but which has resulted in serious air pollution problems. The paper argues that this development ought to be seen in...

International vergleichende Studien und zahllose Pressemeldungen, die über Übergriffe auf ausländische Afrikaner berichten, zeigen, dass sich in der südafrikanischen Gesellschaft seit dem Ende der Apartheid ein Klima der Fremdenfeindlichkeit verbreitet hat. Im Kontrast zum Ausmaß des...

In this paper we analyse household income mobility dynamics among Africans in South Africa?s most populous province, Kwazulu-Natal, between 1993 and 1998. Compared to industrialized and most developing countries, mobility has been quite high, as might have been expected after the transition in...

High unemployment in many OECD countries is often attributed, at least in part, to the generosity and long duration of unemployment compensation. It is therefore instructive to examine a country where high unemployment exists despite the near complete absence of an unemployment insurance system....

Currency crises episodes of 1996, 1998, and 2001 are used to identify common country specific causes of currency crises in South Africa. The paper identifies crises by the use of an Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) index as introduced by Eichengreen, Rose and Wyplosz (1996). It extends the Signals...