Annual Forum Papers
Annual Forum Papers (440)
- Year 2004
- Author(s) Afeikhena Jerome
- Countries and Regions Southern African Development Community (SADC)
Despite the perceived role of efficient infrastructure as critical element for economic growth, poverty reduction and the attainment of the millennium development goals, there is clear evidence that the provision of infrastructure in Africa has been much below standard in terms of quantity and quality. Over the past decade, there…
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- infrastructure_Reform_Jerome.pdf (3233 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Morne Oosthuizen; Haroon Bhorat
- Countries and Regions South Africa
Since 1994, the South African economy has undergone significant changes with the government implementing various policies aimed at redressing the injustices of the past, fleshing out the welfare system and improving competitiveness as South Africa becomes increasingly integrated into the global economy. These policies have, directly or indirectly, impacted on…
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- The_post_apartheid_SA_Labour_market_oosthuizen_Bhorat.pdf (3313 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Channing Arndt; Kenneth Simler
- Countries and Regions Mozambique
The "Cost of Basic Needs" (CBN) approach to drawing consumption based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN approach are often demonstrably utility inconsistent. Here,…
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- estimating_utility_consistent_poverty_lines_ArndtSimler.pdf (2501 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Ron Sandrey; Dirk van Seventer
This study finds that export trade widened rather than deepened as a result of the CER trade agreement with Australia. Trade has expanded in those products that were not heavily traded prior to the agreement as opposed to an expansion of traditional-exports that were traded at the start of the…
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- has_the_New_Zealand-Australian_Closer_Sandrey.pdf (3000 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Goran Djurfeldt; Rolf Larsson
- Countries and Regions Southern African Development Community (SADC)
This paper deals with the importance of agricultural policy and technology for farmers' food security and market integration. We draw on data recently collected in interviews with over 3000 farmers in eight sub-Saharan African countries.2 The results indicate that the food production among African smallholders is highly responsive to increased…
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- Djurfeldt_Larsson_Food_security.pdf (3078 Downloads)
- Year 2004
- Author(s) Gabriel Tati
- Countries and Regions Swaziland
Why is poverty so pervasive in Swaziland despite substantial economic growth achieved through extreme economic openness over several years? Is poverty alleviation in Swaziland a more reachable goal than was in the past, as this country strives to restore rapid economic growth through AGOA facilitating greater insertion into the global…
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Thierry Latreille
Poverty reduction policies have become the main guidelines of economic policies in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Therefore the authorities need new social indicators in order to follow the application and the effectiveness of their policies. In recent years renewed efforts have been made to develop new policy tools aimed at…
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- the__Conjuncture_of_Poverty_Latreille.pdf (2469 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Rosemary N. Okoh
- Countries and Regions Southern African Development Community (SADC)
This paper is an empirical analysis of the demand for Nigeria's non-oil export merchandise with a view to providing an answer to the question of how far the present product mix would go in the global market. The study employed the Johansen's test of co-integration and analysis of structural characteristics…
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- The_global_market_place_Okoh.pdf (2605 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Rashad Cassim; Dirk van Seventer
- Countries and Regions South Africa
As part of a wider investigation by the National Institute for Economic Policy, covering a range of economic policy issues, the main aim of this paper is to provide another view of how trade policy has evolved since democracy. We use standard quantities measures of trade policy analysis as an…
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- South_African_Trade_Reform_Cassim_Van_Seventer.pdf (2557 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Cecil Mlatshni; Murray Leibbrandt
- Countries and Regions Southern African Development Community (SADC)
This paper makes use of a review of the literature on African labour markets, the international literature on youth and the labour market and a fifteen country African data set to analyze the current situation of youth in sub-Saharan labour markets.
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- Youth_in_SSA_CecilMlatshni.pdf (2573 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Craig Gundersen; Thomas Kelly; Kyle Jemison
- Countries and Regions Zimbabwe
We examine the effect of orphan status on school enrolment in Zimbabwe, a country strongly impacted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic with a rapidly growing population of orphans. Using data from 2003, after controlling for other determinants of enrolment we find that orphans are less likely to attend school than non-orphans.…
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- Demand_for_education_Gunder.pdf (1850 Downloads)
- Year 2004
- Author(s) Martin Wittenberg
- Countries and Regions South Africa
Absences can be as telling as presences, as Sherlock Holmes reminds us. Some times, however, it is difficult to know whether one is really dealing with an absence or not. In the case of South African labour economics some absences have attracted attention: the surprisingly small size of the informal…
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- wittenberg_EmploymentPuzzle.pdf (2088 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Ronelle Burger; Servaas van der Berg; Sarel van der Walt; Derek Yu
- Countries and Regions South Africa
The persistence of geographical inequalities is an intriguing puzzle. Many explanations have been offered for why specific geographies flourish while other regions deteriorate.Some have highlighted the impact of natural constraints, like the limited availability of arable land,distance from the sea and the prevalence of disease. Others have stressed the importance…
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- Geography_as_Destiny_Burger.pdf (2292 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) David Fryer
- Countries and Regions South Africa
There is significant consensus that unemployment and more generally, exclusion from the labour market,is the central socio-economic problem in South Africa. Joblessness is strongly implicated in such socio-economic problems as crime, poverty, alcoholism, HIV-AIDS, and even poor educational outcomes and low skill levels (see for example Bhorat etal.2001; Fryer and…
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- The_Dynamics_of_Job_Search_Fryer.pdf (2208 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Marijke Verpoorten; Lode Berlage
During the nineties Rwandan households faced severe shocks of war and genocide. In addition, the structural problem of land scarcity remains unsolved. How did Rwandan households manage? This is an important question from a development perspective, but also from a security perspective, because uneven development raises the risk of renewed…
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- Genocide_and_Land_Scarcity_Verpooten.pdf (2506 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Kym Anderson; Lee Ann Jackson
The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase farmer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields. The next generation of GM food research is focusing also on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers, beginning with 'golden rice', which has been genetically engineered to contain a…
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- Implications_of_Genetically_KYM_Anderson.pdf (2593 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Tom Hertz
- Countries and Regions South Africa
In September of 2002 South Africa's roughly one million domestic workers - about 840,000 predominantly African and Coloured women who work as housekeepers, cooks and nannies, and another 180,000 men who work primarily as gardeners - were granted formal labor market protection, including the right to a written contract with…
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- hertz_Minimum_Wages_for_Domestics.pdf (2212 Downloads)
- Year 2004
- Author(s) Geeta Kingdon; John Knight
- Countries and Regions South Africa
The conventional approach of economists to the measurement of poverty in poor countries is to use measures of income or consumption. This has been challenged by those who favour broader criteria for poverty and its avoidance. These include the fulfilment of 'basic needs', the 'capabilities' to be and to do…
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- KingdonKnight-Wel-being_Poverty_versus_income_poverty.PDF (1817 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Lawrence Edwards; Duncan Pieterse
- Countries and Regions South Africa
This paper estimates the impact of trade liberalisation on factor returns in South Africa between 1988 and 2002. A particular contribution of the paper is that tariff data are explicitly used in the analysis. In addition, the paper models trade-induced technological change. The paper finds that tariff liberalisation from 1988…
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- trade_Liberalisation_and_Factor_Returns_in_SA_Edwards.pdf (1813 Downloads)
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- Year 2004
- Author(s) Leonid Azarnert
- Countries and Regions Southern African Development Community (SADC)
This paper investigates the relationship between foreign aid and population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using a panel of African countries over the last four decades, it demonstrates the positive effect of foreign aid on fertility and population growth in this region.
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- foreign_Aid_and_Population_Growth_Leonid_Azarnert.pdf (2156 Downloads)
- Year 2004
- Author(s) Geeta Kingdon; John Knight
- Countries and Regions South Africa
The paper poses six questions about the determinants of subjective well-being in South Africa. Much of the paper is concerned with the role of relative concepts. We find that comparator income - measured as average income of others in the local residential cluster - enters the household - utility function…
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- KingdonKnight-Community_Comparisons_and_Subjective.pdf (2052 Downloads)
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- Year 2003
- Author(s) Nicoli Nattrass
There are two major economic and social security challenges facing South Africa: addressing large-scale unemployment and the AIDS pandemic. As of 2003, an estimated 14% of all South Africans were HIV-positive, with over a thousand people dying each day of AIDS. According to the government household and labour-force surveys conducted…
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- 691.pdf (3333 Downloads)
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- Year 2003
- Author(s) F Booysen; J.P Geldenhuys; M Marinkov,
- Countries and Regions South Africa
Even though the approaches, assumptions and results may vary greatly in the macroeconomic models employed in estimating the impact of HIV/AIDS on the South African economy, the overriding message that these models convey remains the same: the cost of HIV/AIDS to South Africa will be significant in economic, social and…
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- 685_1.pdf (4939 Downloads)
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- Year 2003
- Author(s) Anna McCord
- Countries and Regions South Africa
The South African economy is unable to deliver employment for a growing number of would-be workers, especially among the unskilled. There is a need for state intervention to address this failure, and public works have been identified in the national policy discourse as a central policy response, to address both…
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- 689.pdf (3132 Downloads)
- Year 2003
- Author(s) Erik Thorbecke
Our understanding of the concept of poverty has improved and deepened considerably in the last three decades or so following Amartya Sen's seminal work. We possess presently the analytical tools to identify and locate the poor, to describe their characteristics and to measure the extent of poverty at different levels…
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- 684.pdf (2991 Downloads)
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- Year 2013
- Author(s) Rulof Burger; Ronelle Burger; Servaas van der Berg
- Countries and Regions South Africa
This paper looks at social mobility in the context of a growing economy. The nature and extent of Black affluence in South Africa provides an indicator of the impact of efforts to eradicate the remnants of apartheid-era racial discrimination in the South African education system and labour market. Most studies…
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- 686.pdf (3119 Downloads)
- Year 2003
- Author(s) Richard Devey; Imraan Valodia; Bala Rajaratnam; Myriam Velia
- Countries and Regions South Africa
The province of KwaZulu-Natal (henceforth KZN) is an important contributor to overall national economic performance in South Africa. In 1996, data from the Census of Manufacturing emphasised that KZN ranked second after Gauteng across a series of economic indicators (see for instance Annex Table 1 - part 1, p. 86).…
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- 687.pdf (3311 Downloads)
- Year 2003
- Author(s) Aylit Tina Romm
- Countries and Regions South Africa
This paper uses the Johansen VECM estimation technique to examine the directions of association between savings and growth in South Africa over the period 1946- 1992. We examine the aggregate private saving rate and its interaction with investment and growth. The paper finds that the private saving rate has a…
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- 688.pdf (3138 Downloads)
- Year 2003
- Author(s) David Fryer; Desire Vencatachellum
- Countries and Regions South Africa
South Africa simultaneously lost more than 890,000 jobs and increased the number of skilled workers from 1989 to 1999. We argue this is the consequence of well-documented acute apartheidera distortions which led to a current coordination failure where (i) firms are locked into a mostly skill-intensive technology where they have…
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- 690.pdf (3350 Downloads)
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- Year 2003
- Author(s) Marna Kearney
Poverty in South Africa is severe. Zero-rating food can possibly reduce poverty as poor households spend the largest proportion of their income on food. Zero-rating food can also reduce the regressiveness of Value Added Tax (VAT) for the same reason. However, zero-rating food will results in a loss in revenue…
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- 709.pdf (3370 Downloads)
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