The poor performance of many African economies has been associated with low growth of exports in general and of manufacturing exports in particular. In this paper we draw on micro evidence of manufacturing firms in five African countries - Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria - to...

ABSTRACT Little is known about job matching in labour markets with mass unemployment. Using a unique data set of labour market experiences of young African job participants in South Africa, our findings show that accessing jobs through various employment channels is non‐random. Specifically,...

• Youth unemployment in South Africa is high, differs substantially by race group and is increasing. In 2012, close to two-thirds of young Africans were broadly unemployed. Over the four years prior to this the unemployment rate had increased by almost ten percentage points. • A wage subsidy...

We revisit the question of why exchange-rate-based (ERB) disinflation is often expansionary. We use an analytical DGE model in discrete time with staggered wages. If the policy is unanticipated, and if the currency is pegged at the level it would have reached under unchanged policies, then a...

One objection to delegating monetary policy to an independent central bank is that it causes lack of coordination with fiscal policy. Nordhaus has recently shown, in a simple game-theoretic model, how this generates too-contractionary monetary policy and too-expansionary fiscal policy, with...

The paper specifically examines: labour regulations and their relationship with employment and investment; trade regulations; permits and licences for businesses; visa regulations; the predictability of regulatory application; and the costs of regulation. It also investigates the ways firms...

We construct a staggered-price dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations based on uncertain lifetimes. Price stickiness plus lack of Ricardian Equivalence could be expected to make an increase in government debt, with associated changes in lump-sum taxation, effective in...

European capital markets show increasing concern about the extent of sovereign debts and their sustainability. Here we explore some insights that the Overlapping Generations (OLG) framework has to offer on such issues. The OLG framework implies, for example, that there is a limit to the amount...

Vocational training programmes, like South Africa.s learnership programme, which combine classroom learning and on-the-job training seem like the type of intervention which can create skills, get young people into jobs quicker, and reduce youth unemployme

We construct a staggered-price dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations based on uncertain lifetimes. Price stickiness plus lack of Ricardian Equivalence could be expected to make an increase in government debt, with associated changes in lump-sum taxation, effective in...