Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates, simulating incomes in prepandemic household...

We use a fiscal incidence model based on the South African 2014/15 Living Conditions Survey to simulate the poverty reduction impacts of a selection of medium-to-long-term social grant options with the goal of replacing the existing special COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grant upon its...

The South African economy is generally understood to be characterised by high levels of product market concentration and high firm markups. This paper reviews the existing literature and discusses what can be learnt from new administrative firm-level panel data. I present new evidence on South...

South Africa frequently experiences rolling blackouts ('load shedding') due to shortfalls in electricity generation. This is a common problem across the developing world, and yet the developmental impacts of insufficient and unstable electricity supply, and the benefits of mitigating this, are...

We present new evidence on the effects of South Africa's Employment Tax Incentive (ETI), a hiring and employment wage subsidy aimed at reducing youth unemployment. We show that attempts to estimate firm-level treatment effects via conditional difference-in-differences are likely to fail when...

This paper documents the industry classification variables in the anonymized tax microdata available for research at the National Treasury Secure Data Facility in Pretoria. It discusses how the variables in the data are related to the raw records captured in various tax forms and outlines the...