South Africa in the 1990s became globally more integrated after years of isolation.  Opening the trade and capital accounts gave impetus to a monetary policy regime change to inflation targeting from 2000, after a costly transitional period of monetary mismanagement with low policy...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, a fact often neglected in modeling consumer price inflation.  Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates), are modeled separately and forecast,...

Inflation targeting central banks will be hampered without good models to assist them to be forward-looking.  Many current inflation models fail to forecast turning points adequately, because they miss key underlying long-run influences.  The world is on the cusp of a dramatic turning point in...

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption.  This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of...

South Africa adopted inflation targeting in 2000, targeting the consumer price index (CPI) excluding mortgage interest cost (or CPIX), for “metropolitan and urban areasâ€. However, no clear technical account of the methodology of construction of CPI and CPIX is available from Statistics...

South Africa has overcome adverse initial conditions to achieve a remarkable fiscal transformation since the 1994 democratic elections, held amid uncertainty about its ability to maintain the rule of law and resist populist spending pressures. Constitutionally-based, durable and credible fiscal...

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...

After South Africa`s democratic elections in 1994, large capital inflows were induced by the cessation of trade and financial sanctions, improved creditworthiness and a liberalised capital account for foreigners. The flows were managed in a classic trade-off between currency stability, and...

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...