The public debt/GDP ratio in several countries showed the largest ever peacetime increase during the last 20 years of the twentieth century, thereby causing widespread fiscal unsustainability. Towards the latter half of the 1990s, several governments initiated steps to reverse this trend...

Few countries have as serious an unemployment problem as South Africa. In the period 2000-2013 the narrow (and official) unemployment rate averaged 24.1%. The broad unemployment rate (which includes the discouraged unemployed) averaged 33.4%. At the same time the informal sector is very small...

How does the South African government react to changes in its debt position? In investigating the question, this paper estimates fiscal reaction functions using various methods (OLS, VAR, TAR, GMM, State-Space modelling and VECM). The paper finds that since 1946 the South African government has...