Analysis of export instability and export promotion policies in Zimbabwe, 1980-1987.

A Working Paper in Economics on trade policies and export promotion in Zimbabwe during the period 1980-1987

The Relationship between Household Debt and Consumption Spending in South Africa

Consumption has been and remains the main contributor to gross domestic product (GDP) growth in South Africa. Household debt on the other side has remained high over the years. These two economic indicators are a reflection of the well-being of an economy. This study thus examined the relationship between household debt and consumption spending, for the period between 1994 and 2013. The Johansen cointegration technique and the Vector error correction model (VECM) were utilised to test the long run and short run relationships between the variables. The Granger causality test was also employed to test the direction of causality between the variables. Results from this study have revealed that a relationship exists between household debt and consumption spending in South Africa and they have also showed that this relationship flows from household debt to consumption spending. The implications of these results are that consumption spending may be increased through other measures rather than through increasing debt. The study therefore recommends that policy makers avail more investment opportunities for households and to also create employment in a bid to increase the income of households which can then be used to increase household consumption rather than the use of debt

An Empirical Investigation of Trade Liberalization and Trade Patterns in South Africa

The study made use of the gravity model to analyze the behavior of South Africa’s trade patterns at industry level. Using SIC 2-digit level data for the period 1996-2013 based on two sub-samples, 1996-2004 and 2005-2013, the study found that trade liberalization was not universally influential on trade patterns. Some industries did not exhibit significant behavior changes as a result of tariff liberalization. The results show that Agriculture, mining ores, crude oil, machinery and transport are the only industries from the selected sample of nine that are significantly influenced by trade liberalization policy. Furthermore, empirical results indicate that trade liberalization hinders extensive margins and does not encourage intensive margins. &nbsp

Constructing a cardinal measure of democratic development in a transition polity: the Nigerian example

Existing measures of the level of democracy present in a given state treat democracy as a product and therefore place undue emphasis on actual freedoms enjoyed by the citizens of the country. In transition polities where the actual levels of freedom are low despite continuing efforts to democratize, democracy should be seen as a process rather than a product. A measure that dilutes the end product to capture today's struggles against undemocratic structures and policies does so in order to recognize the foundations these inputs lay for future democratic development. Nigeria exemplifies the many polities in transition on the African continent. This essay looks at the major political events that typify the processes of power change, quality of governance, political environment and democratic dividends, and uses them to construct democratization indices to determine the pattern and level of democratization in Nigeria since political independence. This exercise sets the stage for assessing the impacts of various dimensions of democratization on the performance of the Nigerian economy

Industry concentration and risk taking: Evidence from the South African banking sector.

The quest to gain market share within an industry is argued to drive Decision Making Units (DMUs) to accommodate more risk. The cross sectional variations in risk taking is believed to be influenced by the position of the DMU in the industry, with those on the lower end assuming more risk in order to gain market share. On the other hand, less competition among banks could result in higher interest rates being charged on business loans, which might raise the credit risk of borrowers as a result of moral hazard issues. The South African highly concentrated banking sector presents an opportunity to econometrically investigate such issues. Panel estimation techniques are employed on the South African banking sector unique data set. The model explores the relationship between the specified bank risk measure and bank market concentration measure, controlling for individual bank characteristics and the state of the economy. We find that smaller banks in South African concentrated banking sector are more exposed to credit risk than bigger banks. However, considering the interaction between size and concentration measure, bigger banks in highly concentrated industry are more likely to have high credit risk, in line with the concentration fragility hypothesis. Findings have implications for both policy and management of individual banks.Keywords: Industry concentration; Bank risk-taking; Credit risk; South Afric

The Impact Of Oil Prices On Sectorial Employment In South Africa

Failure to create more jobs is a problem faced by many African countries, and South Africa is not spared. Evidence concerning the effect of oil prices on employment is lacking. The paper examines the impact of factor prices (oil prices) on sectorial employment in South Africa over the period 1994 to 2012 using quarterly data.   The study employs panel data analysis techniques to split the sectorial effects.  The use of panel data econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity is essential to uncover the result, which is completely hidden in OLS estimates.  By adding a dummy of each sector, pure effect of oil prices are estimated through controlling for unobserved heterogeneity.  The effect of oil prices is felt most in the finance sector, followed by construction, then trade - all significant at 1%. Since oil price is positively related to employment in these sectors, it implies that the monetary policy in South Africa is accommodative as given a wage rate, increase in the price of oil leads to increase in price level and thus decrease in real wage

An access control model for a South African National Electronic Health Record System

Countries such as South Africa have attempted to leverage eHealth by digitising patients’ medical records with the ultimate goal of improving the delivery of healthcare. This involves the use of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) which is a longitudinal electronic record of a patient’s information. The EHR is comprised of all of the encounters that have been made at different health facilities. In the national context, the EHR is also known as a national EHR which enables the sharing of patient information between points of care. Despite this, the realisation of a national EHR system puts patients' EHRs at risk. This is because patients’ information, which was once only available at local health facilities in the form of paper-based records, can be accessed anywhere within the country as a national EHR. This results in security and privacy issues since patients’ EHRs are shared with an increasing number of parties who are geographically distributed. This study proposes an access control model that will address the security and privacy issues by providing the right level of secure access to authorised clinicians. The proposed model is based on a combination of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). The study found that RBAC is the most common access control model that is used within the healthcare domain where users’ job functions are based on roles. While RBAC is not able to handle dynamic events such as emergencies, the proposed model’s use of ABAC addresses this limitation. The development of the proposed model followed the design science research paradigm and was informed by the results of the content analysis plus an expert review. The content analysis sample was retrieved by conducting a systematic literature review and the analysis of this sample resulted in 6743 tags. The proposed model was evaluated using an evaluation framework via an expert review

A comparative study of the Linux and windows device driver architecture with a focus on IEEE1394 (high speed serial bus) drivers

New hardware devices are continually being released to the public by hardware manufactures around the world. For these new devices to be usable under a PC operating system, device drivers that extend the functionality of the target operating system have to be constructed. This work examines and compares the device driver architectures currently in use by two of the most widely used operating systems, Microsoft’s Windows and Linux. The IEEE1394 (high speed serial bus) device driver stacks on each operating system are examined and compared as an example of a major device driver stack implementation, including driver requirements for the upcoming IEEE1394.1 bridging standard

Determinants Of Savings In The SADC Region: The Role Of Foreign Capital And Financial Development

The study examines the determinants of savings in the SADC region, mainly focusing on the roles played by external financial flows and financial development in mobilising domestic savings utilising panel cointegration method and the Dynamic ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) approach from 1980 to 2009. Following the review of literature, the empirical model adopted established that there is a long-run relationship between the variables of interest. The results indicate that income, proxied with GDP, financial sector development and foreign capital have a positive relationship with savings. The results also suggest that financial sector development has played a very important role in influencing savings in the region. However on the other hand the results indicate that interest rate and dependency ratio have influenced savings negatively. The empirical results support the hypothesis that foreign savings bridges the gap between domestic demand and supply of finance in the SADC countries. There is need to attract more foreign capital given that it compliments domestic savings. At the same time policies aimed at financial deepening should still be pursued to further deepen the financial system in the SADC countries to further enhance savings.

The Nexus between Macro-Prudential Banking Regulation, Interest Rate Spread and Monetary Policy in South Africa

This study is an empirical attempt to investigate the nexus between macro-prudential banking regulation, interest rate spread and monetary policy in South Africa. The effectiveness of monetary policy and alarmingly wide interest rate spread has been a contentious issue in the corridors of central banks across the globe in this lifetime. This has been largely because monetary policy alone proved to be less efficient in mitigating the effects of systemic risk, particularly during the 2007 financial crisis, necessitating the need for macro-prudential banking regulation. Time series dataset spanning from 1994Q1 to 2016Q4 is employed to carry out this study using the restricted Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model, that is, the Vector Error Correctional Model (VECM). The results show that there is no long-run causality running from trade openness, real exchange rate financial depth interest rate spread and credit growth to the repo rate in South Africa. A short run causality running from credit growth to the repo rate exists from the estimated model. In addition, the empirical results exhibited evidence that interest rate spread has a dampening effect on monetary policy but in the long-run this effect seems reversible in South Africa. Therefore, in order to ensure financial stability, care has to be taken by the South African Reserve Bank and government in choosing the best tool-kit of macro-prudential banking regulation as it can be used to disguise the symptoms of a lax monetary policy framework