The General Equilibrium Effects of a Productivity Increase on the Economy and Gender in South Africa

This study utilises a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to examine the effects of economy-wide (SIM 1) and partial (SIM 2) productivity increases on the economy, gender employment, wages, income and welfare in South Africa. The model has 49 sectors, 14 household categories, and 2 primary inputs. SIM 1 results in ‘output’ led employment demand and increased earnings for all skill types of men and women. Skilled men benefits more than others in most sectors. Under SIM 2, productivity has negative employment impact of all skills mostly in labour-intensive sectors. Some displaced labour relocates to expanded export-orientation and service sectors resulting in increased economy-wide jobs and earnings. Unskilled women earnings, however, decline because they are concentrated in low-paying positions. In addition, productivity improves household’s welfare due to reduced commodity prices and improved earnings.CGE, FDI, South Africa, Gender, Productivity

Alternatives to local content

This paper suggests that an optimal local content policy in the context of flawed institutions is a more minimal one than those typically pursued by developing countries with recently discovered petroleum reserves. We argue that local content requirements need to be seen as a public expenditure question: such requirements increase multinationals' costs and hence reduce the taxes that can be extracted from these companies. There are thus opportunity costs in imposing local content requirements, since the forgone taxes could be used in other ways to improve development prospects. Such requirements can also exacerbate key problems of patronage and rent-seeking

Socioeconomic Impact of Tourism: The Case of Tanzania

The paper shows that while tourism has grown over the past few decades and has made a significant contribution to Tanzania’s exports, Tanzania’s economy and Tanzania’s labour market, Tanzania’s tourism sector could have been more successful. This claim is supported by the fact that Tanzania has a greater number of natural wonders than its competitors, greater potential market and it features more prominently than other destinations in the packages offered by tour operators around the world. The paper further argues that while the tourism sector could be more successful and attract more tourists, there is a trade-off between the economic dividends and the environmental problems that a thriving tourism sector could generate. The key policy implication of the present paper is that Tanzania’s tourism sector should be developed in a sustainable way. By failing to do so and by damaging the environment, the tourism sector could undermine its own sustainability

Tourism and employment: the case of Togo

This paper sets to investigate whether and to what extent the development of tourism sector in Togo is associated with and possibly responsible for economic growth, employment creation and generation of wealth in the country. Results from this paper shows that the development of tourism in Togo has created both business and employment opportunities and that the expansion of the workforce in this sector has been associated with, and to some extent it has been responsible for, a decline in the unemployment rate in the country. In light of these findings, we recommend that the Togolese government should ensure that the tourism sector is strategically built in such a way that it forms an integral part of all of its development plans and that more serious efforts are invested in marketing the sector which is currently largely underutilized

Evaluating the Performance of Parliamentary Committees

Assessing parliamentary committees’ performance is important as it can ensure good governance. This has prompted various scholars and practitioners to devise several evaluation methods over the past two decades. Some of the methods include measuring the number of important bills that committees pass, measuring the number of important issues that committees address and measuring the number of unimportant bills, which committees block. While all these methods are important in advancing the knowledge of assessing committees’ performance, they are not very useful to parliamentary actors such as parliamentarians as they lack the sense of contemporaneousness in their measurements. It is in this context that using documentary review and data from reliable sources such as World Governance Indicators, this paper innovatively presents a rule of thumb proposing that parliamentary committees’ performance should instantaneously, be measured by the extent to which actions of a particular committee are consistent with three E’s namely, economy, effectiveness and efficiency

Public accounts committees in Eastern Africa: a comparative analysis

Properly functioning Public Accounts Committees (PACs) are essential for promoting good governance, preventing misallocation of resources and curbing corruption. The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the organization, powers and the performance of East Africa’s PACs so as to understand what they do, what makes them work well and what could make them work better. The analysis reveals that the Tanzania’s PAC is the most active in the region because while it has fewer resources at its disposal than its Eastern African counterparts, it makes a more efficient use of the available resources as indicated by the fact that the Tanzanian Pac was able to carry out more oversight activities than the other PACs operating in the region in spite of having fewer resources. This evidence sustains the claim that legislators’ political will is the single most important determinant of effective oversight. On the basis of the evidence presented in the paper, we formulate two policy recommendations: that in order to secure a more effective PAC performance, international organizations should pay greater attention to ensuring that legislators have the will to be effective overseers and that the Tanzania’s PAC needs to be more adequately staffed and resourced

Does Citizen's Trust in Government Increase Willingness to Pay Taxes in Tanzania? A Case Study of Mtwara, Lindi and Dar es Salaam Regions

This paper examines the citizen's trust in government and their willingness to pay taxes to improve public goods and services in Tanzania. We use logit model to estimate the effect of government trust on willingness to pay taxes on improved public goods/services. Chi square test finds an association between citizen's trust in government and their willingness to pay taxes for improved public good/services. Logit estimations show that an increase of one unit of public service delivery is associated with increase of citizen's trust in the government. Furthermore, we find that taxpayers are dissatisfied with public services/goods provided by the government. Only 43.5% of citizens showed an average satisfaction on public services delivery. The policy implication is that, providing better public services to the society is an effective tool to raise tax revenues in the government. Keywords: Willingness to pay taxes, Trust in government, logit model