In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy said that "a rising tide lifts all the boats. And a partnership, by definition, serves both parties, without domination or unfair advantage." US international economic policy since World War II has been based on the premise that foreign economic growth is in...

This paper documents some of the main features of price setting behaviour by retail outlets in Lesotho over the period March 2002 to December 2009. The sample of data covers 229 product items for 345 retail outlets. The paper has three main objectives. Firstly, it presents key indicators of...

Empirical evidence on the extent to which product markets are integrated within Africa remains noticeably limited. This paper uses highly disaggregated retail price data for 32 narrowly defined products collected at the district level in five SADC countries (Botswana, Malawi, South Africa,...

Chinese manufacturing exports to Sub-Saharan Africa challenge South Africa's economic influence in the region. To evaluate this, the paper develops and applies a conceptual framework that distinguishes between the intensive and extensive margins of Chinese export competition. South African...

Wage subsidies have been used in both developed and developing countries to raise employment. After a decade of deliberation, the South African Government recently announced the introduction of a wage subsidy scheme. Given the intrinsic link between unemployment and poverty in South Africa, the...

Do Southern African Development Community countries trade enough with each other and with the rest of the world? Although its share of world trade has fallen, appropriate benchmarking shows that, controlling for gross domestic product and other characteristics, Southern African Development...

With the onset of trade liberalisation, fears have been raised concerning the impact of trade on manufacturing output, employment and growth. Using an input-output methodology, this article decomposes South African output growth between 1984 and 1997 into final demand expansion, trade flows and...

Conventional trade theory, which combines the Heckscher-Ohlin theory and the Stolper- Samuelson theorem, implies that expanded trade between developed and developing countries will increase wage equality in the former. This theory is widely applied. It serves as the basis for estimating the...

Wage or employment subsidies have been used in both developed and developing countries to raise employment levels. Various advisers to the South African government have endorsed wage subsidies as a policy measure to deal with this country’s massive unemployment problem. This paper takes stock...

Lesotho and other least developed African countries responded impressively to the preferences they were granted under the African Growth and Opportunities Act with a rapid increase in their clothing exports to the US. But this performance has not been accompanied by some of the more dynamic...