The Economic Influence of Infrastructural Expenditure: A Multiplier Decomposition and Structural Path Analysis
Garcia et al. explore the use of structural path analysis in assessing the potential economic impact of the South African government’s planned infrastructural programme of R787 billion. The construction sector is large enough to accommodate a substantial stimulus and has significant linkages with other production activities and households at all income levels. Structural path analysis…
read more >>Administered Prices Study on Economic Inputs: Executive Summary – Ports, Rail, Water
“This is the executive summary of an extensive report examining the prices of goods and services provided by entities owned by the South African government in water, rail and ports. Prices in these three sectors are referred to as ‘administered’ due to the public ownership of the entities providing them. Furthermore, each sector provides important…
read more >>South Africa’s Economic Development Trajectory: Implications for Skills Development Strategy
Mayer and Altman argue that skills development in South Africa must be aligned to the economic and political imperatives of reducing unemployment and poverty, while fostering growth and international competitiveness. The legacy of a resource-based economy, overlaid by apartheid policies, has resulted in widespread poverty, inequality and unemployment existing alongside globally competitive industries. It is…
read more >>Employment and skills in South African Exports
Van Seventer reports on the labour absorption of South Africa’s exports, using a simple configuration based on a first-generation social accounting matrix (SAM). It compares the labour absorption of exports with that of domestic demand, and also discusses labour absorption by destination market. A distinction is made between full backward linkages and those where supply…
read more >>The Contribution of Manufacturing and Services to Employment Creation and Growth in South Africa
Tregenna examines the linkages between the manufacturing and services sectors. It also looks at linkages between these two sectors and the rest of the domestic economy. Tregenna does this by analysing input-output tables and employment trends. This reveals that manufacturing is particularly important as a source of demand for the services sector as well as…
read more >>Determinants of Income Mobility and Household Poverty Dynamics in South Africa
Woolard and Klaasen analyse household income mobility dynamics among Africans in South Africa’s most populous province, Kwazulu-Natal, between 1993 and 1998. Compared to industrialized and most developing countries, mobility has been quite high, as might have been expected after the transition in South Africa. This finding is robust when measurement error is controlled for. When…
read more >>Sectoral Elasticity of Substitution and Returns to Scale in South Africa
Elasticity of substitution and returns to scale are estimated on a sectoral basis for South Africa using panel-based generalised least square procedure. Apart from sectoral differences in terms of elasticity of substitution, the study found that elasticity of substitution is below unity in all of the sectors. Most of the sectors studied are found to…
read more >>Leading Indicators of Employment in South Africa
Davies and van Seventer explore how an indicator might be constructed that can be used to predict employment. It assesses the various series that are used to construct the South African Reserve Bank’s leading, coincident and lagging indicators of the business cycle Business cycle analysts typically identify cycles in GDP and then examine series of…
read more >>The institutional underpinnings of the unemployment-inflation relationship: a review paper
“Michie examines the institutional underpinnings in the relations between unemployment and inflation. This is a central question for policy makers in solving significant structural unemployment gaps: interventions to stimulate the economy can often lead to inflationary impacts unless the institutional environment enables the required response by firms to invest and ultimately generate more employment. He…
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