We investigate the impact of unanticipated United States (US) bond yield increases, federal funds rate tightening, and monetary stimulus shocks on the South African economy using structural VAR models. Firstly, the US monetary stimulus shock leads to weak consumer price inflation, rand-dollar...

This paper investigates the policy trade-off between inflation volatility and output volatility, also referred to as the Taylor curve. In so doing, the paper assesses whether the Taylor curve has shifted over time, how demand and supply shocks affect the volatilities of inflation and the output...

Structural vector autoregression (SVAR) models were used in this study to investigate how unexpected increases in euro area bond yields and monetary stimulus are transmitted to the South African economy using data from January 1999 to June 2008. Firstly, evidence is found that this is consistent...

This paper compares the effects of contractionary monetary policy and exchange rate appreciation shocks of one standard deviation in size, on the South Africa trade balance using recursive and sign-restriction vector autoregressive models. We find that an exchange rate appreciation shock lowers...

The main purpose of this paper is to construct a financial conditions index (FCI) for South Africa. The analysis extracts the index by applying two alternative approaches (principal component analysis and Kalman filter), which identify an unobservable common factor from a group of external and...

This paper investigates the di¤erent channels of transmission of monetary policy shock in South Africa in a data-rich environment. The analysis contains 165 quarterly variables observed from 1990Q1 to 2012Q2. We use a Large Bayesian Vector Autoregressive model, which can easily accommodate a...

Many communities suffer limited public goods provision due to civil servants (doctors, teachers, etc) supplementing their low income with moonlighting activities. Monitors of civil servants commonly also earn low salaries from monitoring and may prefer political contestation for power and...

This paper examines macroeconomic trends, drivers and impact of remittances in Africa. First, it documents the increasing share of remittances relative to other foreign capital flows to Africa, distribution of remittance inflows across countries, and some key properties. This is followed by some...

The end of apartheid in 1994 ushered in a new era in South Africa and with it came the challenge of building a democratic, inclusive and stable society. The government led by the African National Congress initially followed a neoliberal stance to manage the economy and a redistributive strategy...

In this paper we show that commodity price co-movements between petroleum and other commodities, although infrequent, are not unique to recent periods, as alluded to in the current literature. We find that much of the volatility in commodity prices over long time spans is caused by economic...