At what level does a currency’s volatility become ‘excessive’, in a concrete sense? Any claim that an exchange rate is excessively volatile needs a benchmark for ‘normal’variability. We compute variance bounds implied by exchange rate models as the norm, for a set of...

The study investigates the role of mineral resources in economic development and sees how the extractive sector impacts the overall performance of the economy of a country endowed with a diverse minerals and metals. We analyzed the economic growth model using human capital, population growth,...

Estuaries are open access public goods in the sense that it is difficult to exclude people from accessing and using them, and that the marginal cost of this use is low. Given the overwhelming evidence available on the significance of freshwater inflow to estuary functionality, it is clear that...

We study the liquidity allocation among European banks around the Lehman insolvency using a novel dataset of all interbank loans settled via the Eurosystem’s payment system TARGET2. Following the Lehman insolvency, lenders in the overnight segment become sensitive to counterparty...

Quantitative methods to forecasting tourist arrivals can be sub-divided into causal methods and non-causal methods. Non-causal time series methods remain popular tourism forecasting tools due to the accuracy of their forecasting ability and general ease of use. Since tourist arrivals exhibit...

This paper investigates the changes in the South African labour market in the post-apartheid period in 1995-2013 by updating the work by Oosthuizen (2006) and Yu (2008). The three main data sources used are the October Household Survey of 1995, the Labour Force Survey of September 2004 and the...

In this paper we investigate the likelihood of a proposed monetary union in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) being successful from the viewpoint of the Generalised Purchasing Power Parity (GPPP) hypothesis and optimum currency area (OCA) theory. We apply Johansen’s...

This paper investigates the causes and consequences of colonial Africa’s first financial crash, which happened in South Africa’s Dutch Cape Colony. The 1788–1793 crisis followed a common sequence of events: trade and fiscal deficits were monetized by printing money, credit...

We examine the impact of ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) on existing cultural measures employed in various social sciences. Not only do high levels of fractionalization affect the use of statistical means to account for cultural distance, we show that it is not constant and therefore...

The study attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of social media on cognitive development among undergraduate economics students at a South African university. The study collects data on student postings to discussion topics posted on Facebook and Twitter. The use of 3 well-known rubrics for...