The South African constitution is considered progressive and transformative in intention due to its inclusion of socioeconomic rights, such as the right to education, land, food, and healthcare. However, some of these rights are qualified by the availability of resources to the state, which...

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...

During the last decade economic literature explored the presence of and reasons for what became known as "the great moderation" in the US and other G7 countries. "The great moderation" describes the decrease in economic volatility experienced in many of the G7 countries. This paper finds that in...

The question this paper investigates is whether or not different metropolitan areas each constitute a separate housing market or whether or not there is a single South African housing market. Theory on the Law of One Price suggests that if products or geographic areas belong in the same market,...

Few countries have as serious an unemployment problem as South Africa. In the period 2000-2013 the narrow (and official) unemployment rate averaged 24.1%. The broad unemployment rate (which includes the discouraged unemployed) averaged 33.4%. At the same time the informal sector is very small...

How does the South African government react to changes in its debt position? In investigating the question, this paper estimates fiscal reaction functions using various methods (OLS, VAR, TAR, GMM, State-Space modelling and VECM). The paper finds that since 1946 the South African government has...