This paper reviews the design and performance of monetary policy in South Africa (SA) during 1994-2004. Quantitative indexes of transparency reveal a strong rise in the transparency and accountability of monetary policy between 1994 and 2004. Inflation and interest rate expectations data and...

Without information on the market values of the main components of household wealth, it is difficult to understand the behaviour of aggregate consumer spending and of the broad money holdings of households. This paper constructs the first coherent set of aggregate personal sector wealth...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. Much of the empirical literature is marred by poor controls for the common drivers both of house prices and consumption, including income, income growth expectations, interest rates, credit supply...

In common with many emerging market countries, South Africa`s government does not publish balance sheet wealth estimates on a market value basis, as produced in the U.S., U.K., Japan, and elsewhere. Yet without information on the market values of liquid and illiquid personal sector wealth, it is...

Evolving openness to trade is hard to measure, despite its relevance to models of growth, inflation and exchange rates. Our innovative technique measures trade openness encompassing both observable trade policy (tariffs and surcharges) and unobservable trade policy (quotas and other non-tariff...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, but this fact is ignored in most work on consumer price inflation. Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates, or CPIX) for South Africa are modeled separately...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...

Economic conditions exert a strong influence on regional migration. On the one hand, strong labour market conditions, as exemplified by low unemployment rates and high earnings, draw migrants into regions. On the other hand, strong housing market conditions can prevent movement since expensive...

This paper investigates the bubbles hypothesis with a dynamic panel data model of British regional house prices between 1972 and 2003. The model consists of a system of inverted housing demand equations, incorporating spatial interactions and lags and relevant spatial parameter heterogeneity....