Why productivity matters
Over the long term, productivity is a key determinant of a country’s per capita income. South Africa’s poor productivity performance over recent history is very concerning.
Measuring data availability by country
How does data availability compare across countries? The World Bank is a major source of country-level economic, financial and socioeconomic data. In this post, we summarise the number of data series available from the World Bank for different countries as a proxy for macroeconomic and social data availability. We update our earlier estimates, this time dropping missing values, and inspecting 100% of the available indicators, to provide a more accurate description of data availability.
How anchored are US expectations compared to SA inflation expectations?
One way to assess how anchored inflation expectations are is to look at how inflation expectations react to deviations in inflation from the inflation target. Today’s post shows that inflation expectations in South Africa react more strongly to inflation deviations from the target than in the US, suggestive of less well-anchored expectations.
Which features matter most in vehicle pricing?
Understanding what drives the price of a vehicle is critical for both buyers and sellers. In today’s post, we use scraped data from WeBuyCars listings and use a machine learning model to identify the features that most significantly impact vehicle pricing. As an example, we use a decision tree model to assess what features tend to matter most for raising the price of a vehicle beyond R500 000.
Do JSE Top 40 companies talk more about profits or sustainability?
In recent years, the priorities of large corporations have been evolving, with a growing focus on sustainability alongside traditional financial performance. One interesting way to explore this shift is by looking at the frequency of terms like “profit” and “sustainability” in the annual reports of JSE Top 40 companies over time.
When should SA’s inflation target be lowered?
In today’s blog post, I repost my Business Day article in which I argue that I argue that achieving a lower inflation target in South Africa would require help from government.
What impact did the 2024 Budget Review have on USDZAR expectations?
The options market can help us understand how events affect currency expectations and uncertainty. In today’s post, we look back and estimate how market expectations of the future value of the USDZAR shifted around the time of the 2024 Budget Review. Options-implied USDZAR expectations did not shift much by market close on the day of the Budget Review. However, over the following days, the mean of the options-implied USDZAR distribution shifted rightwards, indicative of a higher implied point estimate of the future value of the ZAR over the next 3 months.
Total provincial infrastructure spending in SA
EconData provides unique datasets in an easy to use form for use in excel, R or Python. The provincial budget submodule, for example, makes it possible to do public finance research based on millions of rows of historical data. The chart below provides a summary of total provincial infrastructure spending in South Africa using this dataset, showing that there has been a large decline in infrastructure spending over the last 5 years (especially under our expanded grouping) and it is forecasted to remain flat over the forecast period. Get in touch if you are interested in a demo of EconData.
Home bias by collective investment schemes in South Africa
Today’s post shows that there has been an increase in foreign exposure by South African collective investment schemes since the limit was raised from 30% to 45% in 2022. Not all funds have an offshore investment mandate, with fund-by-fund figures showing that funds that do have foreign exposure that are generally close to the regulatory cap. This reveals a preference for greater diversification and exposure to global markets and inclination to mitigate country-specific risks, such as economic uncertainty or currency volatility.
How many hours of work required to invest in the JSE?
An individual earning the average monthly wage in South Africa (just under R30 000 per month) would need to work approximately half an hour to afford one JSE Top 40 index tracker to get exposure to the index. This has only increased slightly since 2008.
SA’s share of historical global gold production
South Africa has been responsible for over a quarter of the gold estimated to have been produced.
Historical CPI weights 1970 vs current in SA
Historical CPI weights back to 1970 are now available on our EconData platform to premium enterprise subscribers. As far as we are aware, EconData is only source of these historical weights. Today’s post shows that the most significant shift between the regimes of 1970–2000 and 2008–2019 is the increase in the Miscellaneous Goods and Services category weight.
Updated fiscal stance estimates for SA
‘Fiscal space’ refers to the extent to which there remains fiscal resources for fiscal policy to respond to unexpected shocks. The chart below calculates an indicator of the cyclical fiscal stance (i.e. the main budget fiscal balance adjusted for the impact of the business cycle on revenue and expenditure). Using the Treasury’s projections, I also construct a projection of the cyclical component of expenditure and taxes. The measure suggests that the fiscal stance became less prudent (i.e. more negative) after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
Codera’s MPC Dashboard
In today’s post, we provide a demo of our interactive Monetary Policy forecast dashboard that summarises up-to-date projections and automates policy analysis, including providing historical forecast error summaries.
