As actual budget balances reflect both cyclical developments and discretionary measures, they are not very useful when seeking to assess the orientation of underlying fiscal policy and possible structural imbalances in the budget balance. The influence of fluctuations in economic growth on the government's budget balance can be examined by decomposing the actual budget into a cyclical and a structural or cyclically adjusted component. The former component shows the effect on the government budget of cyclical fluctuations in economic activity, the latter reflects what the budget balance would be if economic activity were at its trend level. This paper calculates the extent to which fiscal policy stabilises output fluctuations in South Africa and estimates the cyclically adjusted budget balance of the consolidated general government as an alternative fiscal indicator that can contribute to more effective fiscal policy and fiscal analysis.JEL E63
There has been much controversy about the impact of Chinese growth on the rest of the world. It is generally accepted that China has a dampening effect on global inflation through the supply of cheap products. On the other hand, imports from China could displace domestic production and hence have adverse effects on economic growth and employment. Thus, the question of whether a country benefits from trading with China is a country-specific issue. The results in this paper indicate that limited short-term costs have resulted from the strengthening of trade relations between South Africa and China. As far as inflation is concerned, the paper does not find convincing empirical evidence at the aggregate level for inflation in China leading to domestic price changes. At the disaggregate level, however, there appear to be stronger sector-specific linkages between prices in China and South Africa.China, South Africa, trade, inflation, prices,
Globalisation has opened economies more, exposing them to more international shocks and increasing the challenges to which domestic economic policies must respond. This paper provides a starting point for the analysis of the impact of international economic developments on the South African economy by means of graphical illustrations, correlations coefficients and in some cases a VAR analysis. Although this paper has shed some light on the importance of international economic developments on the South African economy, more rigorous econometric investigation is needed to validate the arguments and to address many of the unresolved questions.
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