This paper evaluates the impact of credit availability on communal and commercial sector maize output in Zimbabwe. This is important given the increased use of concessionary credit for agriculture as a policy strategy to increase agricultural output and food security, in response to the...

In South Africa, marriage rates among white women aged 20 to 34 are at least twice as high as marriage rates among African women in the same age cohort. This paper compares the relationship between alternative definitions of sex ratios and marriage outcomes among African and white women using...

The Unbiased Forward Rate Hypothesis (UFRH) stipulates that the forward rates should be a perfect predictor for the future spot rates. A number of studies have tested the UFRH and foreign market efficiency and concluded that the hypothesis does not hold. This phenomenon is known as the UFRH...

In this paper, we investigate female part-time employment in South Africa. Using household survey data for South Africa from 1995 to 2004, we show that women are over-represented in part-time employment, and that the growth in part-time work has been an important feature of the feminisation of...

Of all the developing countries that participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey, South Africa was ranked the lowest, in terms of entrepreneurial activity. It is clear that South Africa is not producing a sufficiently entrepreneurial economy and this needs to be addressed so as to...

This paper uses relatively recent time series techniques on data spanning over different pricing regimes to estimate the aggregate agricultural supply response to price and non-price factors in Zimbabwe. The ARDL approach to cointegration employed here gives consistent estimates of supply...

This paper investigates ways in which an efficiency model like ‘DEA Window analysis’ can be utilised, under strictly defined conditions, to assess the level of efficiency of automatic fiscal stabilisers (AFS). The size of AFS is obtained through gaps in both revenue and expenditures...

South Africa is in the grip of an electricity crisis marked by a euphemism known as “load sheddingâ€. The demand for electricity has grown to the point that the supply reserve margin is often under threat, necessitating the electricity supplier to cut supply to some areas for various...

This paper starts from the now widely-held premise that biodiversity conservation ought to take place both inside and outside protected areas if biodiversity targets are to be met. Given the potential inter-linkages of areas inside and outside protected areas in ecosystems, the ultimate...

We examine the characteristics and comovement of cycles in house prices, credit, real activity and interest rates in advanced economies during the past 25 years, using a dynamic generalised factor model. House price cycles generally lead credit and business cycles over the long term, while in...