In an industry plagued by underinvestment and unrest, the emergence of the publicly financed MyCiTi Bus Rapid Transit system has structurally altered the market structure of Cape Town road public transport. Due to the heavy dependence of its rollout on subsidised operating support, and the geographies it has targeted, the distribution of subsidy benefits between households in the city has changed. In this context, this investigation looks to address the question: "Is Cape Town's road public transport affordable, and is subsidised operating support well targeted at poor households?" To do so, the paper evaluates the impact of the industry transition on transport affordability and subsidy distribution with the use of a best practice systematic framework. Revealed in the affordability analysis is that Cape Town road public transport remains unaffordable for the lower quartile of the household income distribution - a finding exacerbated by Cape Town's racial economic geographies. On top of this, distribution analysis shows the significant and regressive impact of the industry transition on the distributional consequences of Cape Town road public transport subsidisation. The central premise of this paper is that this evidence warrants the need to investigate alternative subsidy frameworks. Framed by Cape Town's underlying mobility needs and road public transport market structure, this paper designs and simulates the distributional consequences of an alternative subsidy. The simulation reveals that the regressive impact of the transition can be controlled, and the overall distribution improved, by deriving the subsidy framework by a set of demand-side variables. Rather than being viewed as the complete solution, the paper concludes that this simulation signals the need for follow-up research to validate the findings, and to explore the political and operational feasibility of a demand-side subsidy orientation more thoroughly.

This paper presents results from a randomised controlled trial in low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa, to test whether parental messages can increase learner attendance at after-school programmes. Parents who were randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups received simple weekly text messages providing them with information about their children's attendance in the previous week. Learners whose parents received text messages attended on average 5.6%-6.1% more after-school sessions than the control group (p<0.01), after controlling for background characteristics and spillover effects. This effect was sustained over the course of the observation period. Structured interviews with parents suggest that those parents who received messages were more likely to engage their children regarding the after-school programme, and were better able to monitor their children's attendance. The intervention cost approximately R1.01 per child per week and has potential for replication. However, good quality data collection systems and regular updates of parent contact information are important for the success of similar interventions. This paper shows that low-cost text messages to poorer parents can increase learners' investment in their education, and shows potential to be scaled up.

Iraq is a country with exceptional natural resource wealth, but also consistent political turbulence manifested by high levels of state corruption, patronage networks, weak governance, poor institutional quality, civil unrest and sectarian conflict, all of which have undermined the sovereignty of its vast petroleum wealth and limited its potential for economic prosperity. As a mechanism for reducing the high levels of corruption and patronage networks as well as stimulating economic activity, this dissertation proposes the use of citizen-based direct distribution of oil revenues and studies the economic impacts of this policy using Social Accounting Matrix analysis. The methodology for this analysis includes testing the policy at different levels of per capita distribution, as well as with three variations in the design of the distribution programs. These variations include a universal cash transfer funded by oil revenue surpluses, a targeted cash transfer funded by oil revenue surpluses and a universal cash transfer funded by the reallocation of funding from the existing food subsidy system. The results illustrate that in each of the scenario variations, cash transfers are shown to have a significant positive impact on household incomes, producing activities and aggregate demand in the economy. The results also illustrate a net welfare gain to households when replacing the existing food subsidy system with cash transfers. In the comparison of distribution variations, targeted programs are shown to have the largest effect on the economy, primarily as lower-income households were allocated a greater proportion of income and subsequently also spend a greater proportion of their income on goods with lower leakages. Higher-income households, who are non-recipients in the targeted programs, benefit from targeted programs through the indirect/induced effects, which are largest in comparison to the other distribution variations. The results also show increased consumption on essential goods &amp; services, primarily agricultural produce, which would ease concerns that cash transfers may generate increased consumption on non-essential/temptation goods.

This study sets out to evaluate the impact of industrial mining on local economies, within a context of a developing country with a strict procurement policy on its extractive industry. It contributes empirical evidence on two main ideas on the impact of mining on local communities. The one idea is that mining has a positive impact on local communities because it creates economic activity through economic linkages with local markets; and thus contributes to local industrialisation, economic development, and poverty reduction. The other idea is that mining harms local economies through negative impacts on the environment; which hurts local agriculture and health, leading to an increase in local poverty. By evaluating a case study of a poor rural economy driven by mining and agriculture, this study measures the net average impact of the opening and expansion of mining on local income poverty. Using ward level data combined with firm data, the study essentially uses a difference-in-differences estimation procedure, by exploiting a local input demand shock from large industrial mines, as well as changes in distance to a mine, as sources of variation. The study finds that the opening of a mine is associated with poverty reduction in surrounding communities, while the impact from an expansion of a mine depends on the type of commodity mined. Unpacking these results by commodity gives insight into the concentration of labour and community unrest in the platinum and gold mining sectors in South Africa. The findings of this study remain robust to different indicators of mine expansion, and checks for alternative explanations such as selective migration and sample checks. The study uses the Limpopo Province of South Africa as a suitable case study.

Depression is one of the most prevalent causes of disease burden in the world, with a particularly high prevalence in South Africa. Significant evidence exists for how depression affects employment, income and education, but there is little research on how it affects social decision making. This dissertation addresses the direct impact of depression on the prosocial behaviours that influence economic outcomes, specifically trust and trustworthiness, rather than the economic outcomes themselves. Using experimental and survey data from a randomised control trial, I show that depression reduces trust but, counter-intuitively, increases the trustworthiness of individuals. Additionally, I show that the Activate! programme reduces depression in men and increases trust in all participants. These results have significant implications for how we consider depression in economics, particularly on how it affects poverty by influencing prosocial.

Historically, there are many examples of countries that have had to deal with the unpleasant consequences of economic mismanagement. A recent example is Venezuela, which has imploded into hyperinflation. It is therefore important to consider the question of fiscal sustainability in the South African context. This study ultimately aimed to test the sustainability of South Africa’s fiscal policy and public debt, with fiscal policy defined as the satisfaction of the intertemporal budget constraint. The Augmented Dickey–Fuller test was used to assess the stationarity of national government revenue and national government expenditure – both expressed as percentages of GDP – while the Engle–Granger test was used to test the residuals of the regression between national government revenue and national government expenditure for a long-run relationship. A long-run relationship was found between these two variables, suggesting that fiscal policy and South Africa’s public debt are sustainable. However, due to weakened institutions, the South African government should remain aware that the country’s fiscal policy could easily move into unsustainable territory.

Since 2015, the South African National Treasury has experienced declines in tax-paid cigarette revenues. The declines have been attributed to upward spikes in the illicit tobacco trade. This dissertation explores the upward spike in the illicit tobacco trade, in order to assess whether or not a relationship exists between tobacco companies’ actions and the spike in illicit activity. The study analyses information gathered from semi-structured key informant interviews in order to derive expert insights into the spike. The results indicate that the tobacco industry as a whole is using a variety of tactics to protect their interests. This thesis suggests that the recent increase in the illicit tobacco trade is the result of an increase in under-declared cigarette production by the tobacco industry, which exploits a weak enforcement of antitobacco laws.

This paper examines whether other expenditure in Ghanaian households is crowded out by expenditure on tobacco over the period under study (2005/2006 and 2012/2013) and whether the magnitude of crowding-out over the period has been changed by the introduction of the tobacco control law in July, 2012. The paper uses household survey data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey in the years 2005/2006 and 2012/2013. A system of quadratic conditional Engel curves was estimated for a set of eleven groups of commodities for both periods. The results show a crowding-out of food, alcohol, clothing and transport and a crowding-in of furnishings, health and communication expenditure by tobacco. The magnitude of crowding-in and crowding-out declined over the period under study. The tobacco control law of 2012 was positively associated with a reduction in the prevalence rate of tobacco use among households, and a reduction in household budget share allocation to tobacco.

Botswana is known as Africa's growth miracle, having transformed from one of the poorest countries in the world at independence, into a middle-income economy in a short period of time. The country's success has been reliant on high revenues accrued from its diamond mining industry, however, government expects diamond production to decline rapidly in the next 10 - 15 years. Diamond depletion presents a threat to Botswana's economic growth, development and macroeconomic stability, which has created the urgent need for economic diversification to be realised in the near future. This dissertation explores the concept and theory behind economic diversification for resource abundant countries. Country cases are reviewed alongside the literature on economic diversification, in order to build an analytical framework on economic diversification for mineral-rich economies. The drivers of diversification are classified under three themes: the enabling environment approach, the interventionist approach and the sector-driven approach. Botswana's efforts to diversify are evaluated against these themes, highlighting the prospects and barriers to success. The dissertation concludes that the quest for economic diversification is not an easy one, particularly in countries such as Botswana with single-resource dependence. Moreover, in order for Botswana to succeed, it will require a policy mix incorporating aspects of the three themes. The government of Botswana (GoB) must ensure that they develop an enabling environment to incentivise increased export development; they should invest in physical and human capital in order to facilitate private sector growth, and they should set policies and targets to support sectors that show potential to become internationally competitive.

The effect of announcing future institutional change is investigated in three different contexts: a gains frame, a loss frame, and a loss frame with risk. The institutional change is the transition from a normal public goods game into a threshold public goods game. Announcements may change subject behaviour, through influencing their expectations, before the implementation of the new institution (adjustment effect) and/or after the implementation (adaptation effect).We find that announcements in the gains frame cause zero adjustment effects and negative adaptation effects; while announcements in the loss frame cause positive adjustment and adaptation effects. However, including risk into the threshold phase of the loss frame causes the announcements to have zero effects. These results have important implications for the climate change debate.