In this paper, we analyze symmetric and asymmetric causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in time and frequency domains, using annual data covering the period of 1965-2012. In general, our results tend to suggest that energy consumption causes growth, especially the...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the causal relationship between agricultural prices in South Africa and global oil prices. A nonlinear Granger causality test based on moment conditions, introduced by Nishiyama et al (2011) is employed and we find that there is indeed a causal...

This paper develops and estimates an open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of South Africa. We devote special attention to the impact of stock price wealth effects on output and the interest rate. For this reason we adopt a perpetual youth approach, which allows for a limited...

This paper investigates causality between oil prices and the prices of agricultural commodities in South Africa. We use daily data covering the period April 19, 2005 to July 31, 2014 for oil prices and the prices of soya beans, wheat, sunflower and corn. The test for Granger causality in...

The conduct of inflation targeting is heavily dependent on accurate inflation forecasts. Non-linear models have increasingly featured, along with linear counterparts, in the forecasting literature. In this study, we focus on forecasting South African infl ation by means of non-linear models and...

There exists a huge international literature on the, so-called, Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which in turn, postulates an inverted u-shaped relationship between environmental pollutants and output. The empirical literature on EKC has mainly used test for cointegration, based on...

This study determines whether the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) approach provides better forecasts of key South African variables than a vector error correction model (VECM) and a Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) model augmented with foreign variables. The paper considers both a small...

Forecasting aggregate retail sales may improve portfolio investors’ ability to predict movements in the stock prices of the retailing chains. Therefore, this paper uses 26 (23 single and 3 combination) forecasting models to forecast South Africa’s aggregate seasonal retail sales. We use data...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis to establish whether a causal relationship exists between oil prices and interest rate in South Africa. We employ a causality testing procedure in the frequency domain to analyse the relationship between these two variables. We use monthly data on the...