Volunteers are people who supply labour for the production of goods and services, for the benefit of others. Volunteer work is of significance in a time when social safety nets are weak and there are ever increasing demands on welfare organisations. The question is, who are these good...

This paper adds to the literature on the crowding out effect of tobacco expenditure in two ways. Firstly, the paper uses expenditure data from a low income sub-Saharan African country, Zambia, where most households are poor. Secondly, unlike previous studies, we relax the exclusion restriction...

The majority of academic research on central bank communication has analysed a central bank’s audience as a single group. Analyses, especially empirical research have focused almost exclusively on a central bank’s interaction with the financial markets, facilitated by the...

Navigation of estuaries is a vitally important aspect of boating recreation in South Africa and elsewhere. This paper uses a choice experiment to estimate recreation values of the Kromme River Estuary, a popular estuary along South Africa’s east coast. This valuation methodology allows...

Mankiw and Reis (2002) propose the Sticky Information Phillips Curve as an alternative to the standard New Keynesian Phillips Curve, to address empirical shortcomings in the latter. In this paper, a Sticky Information Phillips curve for South Africa is estimated, which requires data on...

Despite Africa’s exceptional FDI performance during the past decade, the majority of FDI inflows have been directed to a few selected countries. As investors face many risks when investing in developing countries, it is argued that risk perception plays a vital role in the FDI inflows...

This study re-investigates the empirical relationship between exports and economic growth in South Africa using econometric techniques of co-integration and Granger causality over the period 1970Q1-2012Q4. The Johansen approach of co-integration shows that exports and GDP evolved together...

The question about the productivity of slavery is a strongly debated issue, for example in the USA the seminal work by Engerman and Fogel (1974), “Time on the Crossâ€, sparked a flurry of publications debating the issue from different angles. The debate about the economic worth of...

In this paper we measure the economy-wide impact of the 2014 labour strike in South Africa’s platinum industry. The strike lasted five months, ending in June 2014 when producers reached an agreement with the main labour unions. The immediate impacts on local mining towns were particularly...

Counter-cyclical capital buffers are increasingly popular new "macroprudential" tools. However, there is limited empirical evidence on both the intended and unintended consequences of using these buffers. During the pre-crisis period (2002--2007), South Africa increased capital adequacy ratios...