This paper analyzes welfare implications of rising commodity prices in Ethiopia based on household budget surveys. Our findings suggest that a rise in relative prices of such necessities as cereals would lead to a large deterioration in the welfare of households in urban areas. In rural areas...

The main objective of this article is to test the basis of the rumours that have been circulating since late 2011 about the devaluation of the Franc CFA (CFAF). We have used the analyticial framework pioneered by Combes and Plane (2007) and Couharde et al (2011) to calculate the real effective...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...