Is there a Phillips curve relationship present in South Africa and if so, what form does it take? Traditionally the method to establish whether or not there is a relationship between the output gap and the change in inflation is merely to regress the latter on the former. This yields the...

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...

Developmental states are often associated with high economic growth. Japan, South Korea, China and Brazil are all examples, most of which grew at phenomenal rates. The National Development Plan in South Africa sets out the intention of the South African government to transform the government...

Over the past three decades many countries have struggled to find solutions to their persistent public sector deficits. For some the solution to this problem seemingly became the adoption of fiscal rules. This paper considers the applicability of one such rule, namely the output-sensitive...

This paper considers whether or not the poor performance of many African countries can be ascribed to a dependency on primary commodity exports. This is a multidimensional question which concerns the Prebisch-Singer Hypothesis, commodity price volatility, the dependence of GDP on exports and the...