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...

Emerging nations are typically characterized by high energy intensities. Dissemination of energy efficient technologies is far below expectations despite significant potentials for their adoption. Successful energy efficiency strategies are closely connected to institutional efficiency to...

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...

This paper presents a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the analysis of environmental policies towards mining activities, and shows for the case of South Africa how it can be implemented numerically. The CGE model belongs to the class of static, trade-focussed models along the lines...

There is no doubt that an improved hazardous waste management in mining and mineral processing will reduce environmental and health risks in South Africa. However, skeptics fear that waste reduction, appropriate treatment and disposal are not affordable within the current economic circumstances,...

This paper uses efficiency wage theory and the existence of community-based sharing to hypothesize that labor markets in developing countries have multiple equilibria - the same economy can be stuck at different levels of unemployment with different levels of wages. The model is meant for...

The financial and economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 has taken its toll on the South African economy. The economy contracted for the first time since 1998, and entered recession during the fourth quarter of 2008. The GDP contraction was soon transmitted to the labor market. Between the second...

In this paper we test the ability of three of the most popular methods to forecast the South African currency crisis of June 2006. In particular we are interested in the out-ofsample performance of these methods. Thus, we choose the latest crisis to conduct an out-of-sample experiment. In sum,...