The South African government has set as a policy objective the halving of poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article frames government’s stated target of halving poverty by 2014 in terms of specific measures of the poverty gap and poverty...

Starting from the perspective of heterodox Keynesian-Minskyian-Kindlebergian financial economics, this paper begins by highlighting a number of mechanisms that contributed to the current financial crisis. These include excess liquidity, income polarisation, conflicts between financial and...

Economists draw important lessons for modern development from the medieval Maghribi traders who, it has been argued, enforced contracts collectively through a closed, private-order coalition. We show that this view is untenable. Not a single empirical example adduced as evidence of the putative...

We here expand the static tax competition models in symmetric small regions, which were indicated by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) and Wilson (1986), to a dynamic tax competition model in large regions, taking consideration of the regional asymmetry of productivity of public capital and the...

In order to overcome the incentive of excessive maintenance reductions and insufficient network investments in incentive regulation of electricity distribution companies, regulators throughout Europe have started regulating quality of service in the energy sector. In this paper, we discuss the...

Chenery’s factor decomposition method is used to analyse the sources of growth, by sector, in South Africa from 1970 to 2007. Using input-output data, the growth of each sector is decomposed into components associated with export growth; import substitution; growth in domestic demand; and...

This paper examines the effects of firm-level innovation in carbonabatement technologies on optimal cap-and-trade schemes with and without price controls. We characterize optimal cap-and-trade regulation with a price cap and price floor, and compare it to the individual cases of pure taxation...

Motivated by developments in risk-value theory, the author proposes a new utility function which can capture trade-offs between favourable notions of risk and return while exhibiting desirable properties for a financial investor. This function is shown to be sufficient for two fund money...

The purpose of this paper is to consider how to forecast implied volatility for a selection of UK companies with traded options on their stocks. The authors consider a range of GARCH and log--ARFIMA based models as well as some simple forecasting models. Overall, it is found that a log-ARFIMA...

Using two specification tests, the returns from 17 emerging markets and the S&P 500 are tested for Markov regime switching. A trading strategy is formed that invests in the market only when the Markov switching model estimate for probability of a positive returns state in the next period is...