This paper investigates the direction of causal relationship between taxes and expenditure in South Africa, using quarterly data for the period 1960:1-2006:2, and annual data for 1960 to 2005. For both frequencies, gross domestic product and government debt are included in the VAR system as...

In this paper we provide an in-sample assessment of how the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) sets policy rate in the context of both linear and nonlinear Taylor type rule models of monetary policy. Given the controversial debate on whether central banks should target asset prices for economic...

We test the concept of the Opportunistic Approach to monetary policy in South Africa post 2000 inflation targeting regime. Our findings support the two features of the opportunistic approach. First, we find that the models that include an intermediate target that reflects the recent history of...

Recent empirical evidence on the direct link of inflation targeting and inflation volatility is at best mixed. However, comparing inflation volatility across alternative monetary policy regimes within a country based on conventional ways, used in previous studies, begs the question. The question...

Motivated by financial liberalization investors seek for new investment opportunities through international portfolio diversification. To this end we explore any asymmetric causal relationship between developed European stock markets (German, France and U.K) and emerging Baltic markets namely;...

We study the directional accuracy of South African survey data of short-term and longer-term inflation forecasts. Upon applying techniques developed for the study of relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves, we find evidence that forecasts contain information with respect to the subsequent...

The paper assesses the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, across 48 contiguous states of the US, using recent advances in panel data techniques, given the existence of cross-sectional dependence, which in turn, makes reliance on time-series evidence biased. The Common...