Working Paper
The macroeconomic effect of fiscal policy in South Africa
This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a proxySVAR model. Our...
Working Paper
The impacts of public expenditure innovations on real exchange rate volatility in South Africa
This study investigates the impacts of public expenditure innovations on exchange rate volatility in South Africa using quarterly data for the period 1970–2019. To achieve this objective, a version of the vector autoregressive impulse response model...
Working Paper
Structural estimates of the South African sacrifice ratio
This paper estimates the output cost of fighting inflation—the sacrifice ratio—for the South African economy using quarterly data spanning the period 1998Q1–2019Q3. To compute the sacrifice ratio, the structural vector autoregressive model developed...
Working Paper
Pandemics and their impact on oil and metal prices
We examine the effect of pandemics on selected commodity prices—in particular, those of zinc, copper, lead, and oil. We set up a vector autoregressive model and analyse data since the mid-nineteenth century to determine how prices reacted to...
Working Paper
Size matters: measuring the effects of inequality and growth shocks
Understanding the relationship between income inequality and economic growth is of utmost importance to economists and social scientists. In this paper we use a Bayesian structural vector autoregression approach to estimate the relationship between...
Policy Brief
Policy implications of empirically estimated fiscal multipliers for South Africa
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes, there remains significant uncertainty regarding the impact of fiscal policy decisions on macroeconomic outcomes. This impact is quantified by calculating fiscal multipliers. A...
Working Paper
Empirical estimates of fiscal multipliers for South Africa
Despite the frequent use of fiscal policy for stabilization purposes and the important role fiscal activism has played over the last decade, the size of budgetary multipliers (i.e. the output response following an exogenous shock to fiscal policy)...