Working Paper
Debt-financed fiscal stimulus in South Africa
Debt-financed fiscal stimulus programmes directly stimulate aggregate demand through government expenditure or tax cuts, but their effectiveness is highly dependent on direct crowding out of private sector expenditure, spillover effects to the...
Working Paper
Do fiscal regimes matter for fiscal sustainability in South Africa?
This paper empirically examines South Africa’s fiscal sustainability through a Markov-switching model which utilizes quarterly datasets for the period from 1960 to 2019. The results show that public debt responds positively, demonstrating a...
Blog
Making Finance the Servant not the Master
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
Research Brief
Debt
In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, debt crises have plagued low-, middle-, and high-income countries at various times. Indebted countries have generally addressed balance of payments crises either by (a) obtaining International...
Working Paper
Aid, Debt Relief and New Sources of Finance for Meeting the Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the...
Working Paper
Aid, Debt Burden and Government Fiscal Behaviour
This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in Côte d’Ivoire. A special interest is the relationship between aid, debt servicing and debt, given that Côte d’Ivoire is a highly indebted country. The theoretical...
Working Paper
Macro-financial implications of public debt in South Africa
This paper examines the role of financial frictions in the public debt–growth nexus, documenting that a public debt shock has different macro-financial implications dependent on the state of financial markets in South Africa. A non-linear vector...
Working Paper
Emerging public debt challenges in sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)’s public debt burden remains a challenge to development. Key drivers of public debt include large-scale financing of infrastructure development, adverse impact of multiple shocks including COVID-19 pandemic, maturity...
Working Paper
Long-Term Growth and Welfare in Transitional Economies
This paper analyses the long-term growth and welfare impact of the transition to the market economy in the countries of Eastern Europe. We define welfare as the average real net wage after payments of social security contributions to fund a paygo...
Working Paper
Guinea-Bissau
In June 1998, Guinea-Bissau was thrown into conflict by a military revolt. This led to 11 months of fighting, extensive loss of life, and the displacement of up to a third of the country's population. This paper discusses the political economy of the...
Working Paper
Conditionality: Facts, Theory and Policy
Three changes in conditionality of loans are proposed in this study, in order to improve the relations between developing country borrowers and international lending agencies, and make the international cooperative effort at development and stability...
Working Paper
The Intertemporal Effects of International Transfers
The classical transfer problem is studied in an overlapping generations framework, where the transfer is from a creditor country to a debtor country. A distinction is made between tax-financed and debt-financed transfers on the one hand, and between...
Blog
Surprises Ahead?
Tony Addison With six months remaining till the end of 2011, it’s time to take a peek into the near future. What can we expect? John Kenneth Galbraith...
Working Paper
The Burden of Government Debt in the Indian States
In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major...