In a low income economy with a relatively undeveloped financial sector, the normal monetary policy instruments may not have the anticipated desired impact. In particular, economies that may be relatively supply constrained may not respond to money policies as anticipated, owing to a lack of flexibility in the system from economic and institutional constraints. In this case, monetary policies that might otherwise affect the creation of capital for investment and a robust environment for businesses to thrive may not occur. We consider the case of Malawi, which is acknowledged to have a number of supply-side constraints including those related to electricity production and water for agricultural production. We begin with a Cobb-Douglas type production function for the country, which includes droughts, owing to its effect on both electricity production and agriculture. This underlying production function provides an estimate of the long-run supply capacity based on capital, labour and water constraints. In a second stage of the model, we use the Engle-Granger approach to estimate a modified Error Correction Model (ECM) for a short-run growth equation, where we include the movements in monetary variables to test the impact of monetary policy on growth. We estimate our models in EViews for the period 1980 to 2014. Our estimated long-run production function shows that drought depresses real output, and capital and labour have roughly equal importance as factors of production. We then estimate a short-run growth equation using the ECM methodology and find that real exchange rate and real interest rate do not have a significant impact on growth although they have the anticipated sign. We also find that net credit to government and net credit to private sector negatively affect the growth in real output. Although the econometric results are not strong, we note that Malawi has had a history of volatile inflation, which appears to have negative impacts on real output. We believe that our results highlight the importance of more stable management of the money supply, as the monetarism school of thought would propose. We also note that government has been responsible for prolonged fiscal deficits and high borrowing, which may be a cause of the volatile monetary growth. Thus greater coordination of fiscal and monetary policies are needed to create smoother growth and inflation paths.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-103). / This paper investigates how the emergence of male circumcision (MC) as part of a broader HIV prevention strategy will impact on Botswana's HIV/AIDS epidemic. Although is [sic] been more then two decades since Botswana's first case of HIV was diagnosed, HIV/AIDS is still the country's major development challenge. The government has played a key role in providing comprehensive treatment and care interventions and although prevention has always been the government's most important priority, the success of this has been limited. If Botswana is to succeed in decreasing the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in future generations there is a paramount need for more effective prevention interventions. Evidence of the preventative impact of MC presents a major opportunity to address this need. Botswana's government has recognized this opportunity and has begun a scale-up of the MC service in the country's health sector. Qualitative methods and quantitative methods show that the current pro-MC approach towards HIV prevention strategy in Botswana could have a positive impact on the country's HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, the possible unintended effects of the scale-up of MC on behaviour should be considered carefully. Great care should be taken in ensuring that there is clarity amongst circumcised men, as well as the general public, on the 'limited' preventative impact of MC to deter behavioural disinhibition from taking place.

The recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and The Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality reports painted a dire picture of South Africa’s literacy situation: 80% of Grade 4 learners were rendered unable to read for meaning and 27% of Grade 6 learners as functionally illiterate. These results need to be contextualized against the extensive public spending that is incurred on education. Though it appears that learners are in school, they do not seem to be learning, a phenomenon encountered repeatedly in the developing world. The production process of educational outputs is often being hidden in the black box. With a large body of research confirming how reading literacy holds predictive validity for later child development and academic success, Shine Literacy offers an intervention that is set at lower primary school level and is intended as a swift corrective measure for those who struggle to read early on. This dissertation conducted a quasi-experimental impact evaluation by estimating the treatment effect of Shine Literacy via difference-in-differences and propensity score matching. By using the available data which included (1) Shine’s diagnostic test scores, (2) attendance data and (3) Grade 3 Systemic test score data obtained from the Western Cape Department of Education, the estimation procedures arrived at average treatment effects ranging between 0.6 to 1.9 standard deviations. IsiXhosa and “At risk” learners capture the largest test score improvements, and therefore are the main beneficiaries of the programme. This renders Shine Literacy as an extremely valuable input in the production of better literacy and thereby better schooling outcomes. It helps those at the bottom end of the distribution. Furthermore, positive impact on Systemic Mathematics test scores was found as well, confirming the predictive power of literacy on numeracy repeatedly discussed in the literature.

Includes abstract. / In this paper, I examine the school attainment of foster children using data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), collected in the Metropole of Cape Town. Based on cross-sectional data, I show that foster children have a lower grade attainment level than children who live with both their parents, even when they reside in the same household. In particular, double orphans and children with two absent parents perform relatively poorly. However, these disparities may be driven by unobservable factors that differ between foster and biological children. ... Based on an individual fixed effects analysis in which children are examined between the ages of 7 and 17, there is no evidence that separating from parents has a significant effect on the probabilities of advancing from the previous grade. However, non-constant effects of fostering appear to be present.

I study whether South African farm households participating in a land reform program make Pareto efficient intrahousehold consumption decisions. Using evaluation survey data of beneficiary households participating in South Africa’s Land Redistribution for Agricultural Development (LRAD) program, I estimate and test the unitary and collective models of intrahousehold resource allocation. By estimating the households’ demand function’s responses to the size of land grant transfers going to resident men and women, I find evidence rejecting the income pooling hypothesis of the unitary model. On the other hand, I cannot reject the hypothesis that resource allocation is Pareto efficient, satisfying the test of the collective model. An alternative test of the collective model using the z-conditional demand approach proposed by Bourguignon, Browning and Chiappori (2009) also favours Pareto efficiency.

Since 1999 South Africa gradually developed a detailed minimum wage schedule covering eleven sectors of the economy. Labour market institutions were also created to enforce the new laws; the efficacy of which has hitherto remained unexamined. The legislated minimum wage in South Africa varies across, and within sectors. Mandated wages within a sector can differ depending upon occupation type, the number of hours worked, as well as geographic location. There is thus no single national minimum wage. Internationally, minimum wages are widely used as a policy tool to protect vulnerable workers from exploitation and help alleviate poverty. In South Africa the socioeconomic arguments supporting minimum wages are well established, that is, minimum wages aim to redistribute earnings to low paid workers, assist workers with weak bargaining power, and lift the working poor out of poverty. The economic effect that minimum wages have, on employment in particular, is a classic labour economics question which has attracted considerable attention in the international literature. However, as the two introductory quotes illustrate, there is some disagreement among economists as to the precise impact of minimum wages. More broadly there are those who question whether minimum wages are a welfare enhancing intervention at all. The recent introduction of minimum wage laws in South Africa makes comprehensive enquiry into such issues particularly pertinent for economists and policymakers. It is therefore surprising that few empirical studies have investigated the impact of these policies on the local labour market. In an effort to begin filling the gap this paper focuses on the agricultural sector in South Africa. The first component of this paper investigates and measures the aggregate impact of the Agricultural Sectoral Determination. Observing changes in farmworker earnings, contract coverage, employment, and the number hours worked per week, provides insight into the impact of the law. These changes are examined using data from the South African Labour Force Surveys (LFS) 2000-2007 which includes three years before the law was introduced and four years afterwards. Descriptive statistics and difference-in-differences regressions are used to analyse the impact of the law. A control group, made up of similar workers not subject to the law, is used for comparison. Results show that the Sectoral Determination caused significant growth in average farmworker earnings and an increase in the number of workers holding written employment contracts. However, the probability of agricultural employment for a typical worker appears to have fallen, while hours worked were unaffected. After analysing these changes, the second component of the paper examines the associated and underexplored issue of enforcement and compliance. The number of farmworkers receiving sub-minimum wages (i.e. noncompliance) in South Africa is high and thus the observed impact of the law can be seen as a lower bound. I test to see whether the increase in wages which occurs over the period can be linked to formal enforcement of the Sectoral Determination.

With pressures from the recent financial crisis forcing donors to carefully review their spending priorities, some have claimed, firstly, that HIV/AIDS receives too much money relative to its disease burden and, secondly, that the future costs of treating those with the disease will become unmanageable. This paper seeks to clarify each of these two areas...

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references. / This study examines whether Dutch Disease is present in Nigeria in the light of the rejection of the Dutch Disease thesis in other studies on Nigeria. The study assesses the impact of expanding oil revenues on non-oil sectors of the Nigerian economy, taking the agricultural sector as the non-tradable sector.

Includes abstract. / Includes abstract. / Education has come to the fore in development policy and as such has sparked a great deal of research on the relative importance of educational inputs. While school resources and family attributes are often the focus of such work, there are a number of papers exploring the significance of the impact of school management on learner test results. However, much of the quantitative research is inconclusive. This is largely due to the non-standardized and subjective measurements of management that have been used. This dissertation proposes the use of the Institutional Analysis and Design framework of Ostrom and colleagues (1990; 1994; 2005; 2009) as a means of benchmarking school management. The core components of the IAD framework are used to create a series of management indices for a sample of schools in the Western Cape. The paper finds, through a series of statistical approaches, that management is a significant input into the school production function and may be more important than other, previously emphasized, inputs.

Includes bibliographical references / Returns to schooling have typically been estimated with cross-sectional data. However, these studies are fraught with difficulties arising from the endogeneity of education. Individual effects that cannot be measured, such as ability and family background, cause bias in the estimates because they are correlated with education. A panel data approach is thus potentially superior to a cross-sectional one, in that it allows the individual effects to be eliminated with time-differencing. However, time-invariant regressors, such as education, cannot be identified under these time-differencing techniques. This paper therefore uses a Generalized Instrumental Variables method that was developed by Hausman and Taylor (1981) to estimate returns to schooling under a panel data context. This approach both controls for endogeneity bias and allows the identification of time-constant regressors, in this case, education. The re- turns to schooling under this estimation method are approximately 21% for South African individuals who are consistently employed from 2008-2013.