This paper emphasizes the importance of total factor productivity (TFP) developments in the nontradables sector to quantitatively demonstrate that the time-honored Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis does not generally apply to episodes of economic growth. Though the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis...

Determinants of bank-level credit growth in Saudi Arabia are investigated by applying a panel approach to data spanning 2000-15. Strong bank balance sheet conditions, economic activity, and oil prices support bank lending. Reduced bank concentration appears to have helped. Lending remained...

Forecasts of agents who are actively involved in the setting of prices and wages are less readily available than those of professional analysts, but may be more relevant for understanding inflation dynamics. Here we compare inflation expectations anchoring between analysts, businesses and trade...

This paper examines the links between global oil price movements and macroeconomic and financial developments in the GCC. Using a range of multivariate panel approaches, including a panel vector autoregression approach, it finds strong empirical evidence of feedback loops between oil price...

The departure from the Modigliani-Miller conditions, due for instance to market incompleteness, asymmetric information or taxation, tends to increase the importance of indirect channels by which monetary policy affects the level of economic activity in emerging market economies (EMEs). The bank...

Cross-border capital flows are important for South Africa. They fund the nation's relatively large external financing needs and have important financial stability implications evidenced by the large capital outflows and asset price selloffs during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper adds to the...

The turbulence in emerging market economies (EMEs) in mid-2013 has reminded policymakers and investors of the importance of actions by large asset managers for relatively small and illiquid EME asset markets. The presence of asset managers in EMEs has grown considerably, and the concentrated use...

Using monthly data for four selected emerging economies, we find that sterilised central bank foreign exchange intervention has little systematic influence on near-term nominal exchange rate expectations in the direction intended by the central banks. In other words, central bank dollar...

The South African Reserve Bank has continued to fulfill its constitutional mandate to protect the value of the local currency by keeping inflation low and steady. This paper provides evidence that monetary policy tightening aimed at maintaining low and stable inflation could at the same time...

Digitalization is accelerating as countries fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the impact of mobile phone ownership on welfare (represented by consumption) is estimated for South Africa using rich household survey data in a panel format, the National Income Dynamics Study...