After South Africa`s democratic elections in 1994, large capital inflows were induced by the cessation of trade and financial sanctions, improved creditworthiness and a liberalised capital account for foreigners. The flows were managed in a classic trade-off between currency stability, and...

South Africa experienced a momentous change of government from the Apartheid regime to its first democratic government in 1994. This book provides an up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of South Africa's economic policies and performance under democracy. The book includes a stand-alone...

South Africa’s recent adoption of inflation targeting increases the need for good forecasting models of inflation and models for understanding the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper presents multi-step models for inflation and output, four-quarters ahead. The inflation model has...

South Africa experienced substantial rises in the ratios of consumption and household debt to income from 1983, for which conventional explanations in terms of income, income expectations, interest rates and wealth prove inadequate. This paper emphasizes the role of substantial financial...

Official balance sheet estimates for the household sector are not currently available in South Africa. Yet with South Africa`s well-developed financial sector and deep capital markets, asset market channels are likely to be important determinants of aggregate consumer spending and saving,...

We build a 4-equation model of the inflation process in South Africa (which has recently adopted inflation targeting), including the exchange rate, consumer prices, producer price, and import prices. This provides useful information on the speed and extent of exchange rate pass-through, and...

South Africa in the 1990s became globally more integrated after years of isolation.  Opening the trade and capital accounts gave impetus to a monetary policy regime change to inflation targeting from 2000, after a costly transitional period of monetary mismanagement with low policy...

Inflation is a far from homogeneous phenomenon, a fact often neglected in modeling consumer price inflation.  Using a novel methodology grounded in theory, the ten sub-components of the consumer price index (excluding mortgage interest rates), are modeled separately and forecast,...

Inflation targeting central banks will be hampered without good models to assist them to be forward-looking.  Many current inflation models fail to forecast turning points adequately, because they miss key underlying long-run influences.  The world is on the cusp of a dramatic turning point in...