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The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact of electricity power outages on the local housing market in South Africa.

This study uses the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) and quantile autoregressive distributive lag (QARDL) models on annual time series data, for the period 1971–2014. The interest rate, real income and inflation were used as control variables to enable a multivariate framework.

The results from the ARDL model show that real income is the only factor influencing housing price over the long run, whereas other variables only have short-run effects. The estimates from the QARDL further reveal hidden cointegration relationship over the long run with higher quantile levels of distribution and transmission losses raising the residential price growth.

Overall, the findings of this study imply that the South African housing market is more vulnerable to property devaluation caused by power outages over the short run and yet remains resilient to loadshedding over the long run. Other macro-economic factors, such as real income and inflation, are more influential factors towards long-run developments in the residential market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the empirical relationship between power outages and housing price growth.

The purpose of our study is to examine the inflation–growth nexus relationship for Swaziland between 1975 and 2016 with the intention of estimating an optimal level of inflation, which maxims economic growth or minimizes growth losses.

We estimate on an endogenous monetary model of economic growth augmented with a credit technology using a smooth transition regression (STR) model, which allows us to estimate an optimal inflation rate characterized by smooth transition between different inflation regimes.

Our empirical results point to an inflation threshold estimate of 7.64 per cent at which economic growth gains are maximized or similarly growth losses are minimized. In particular, we find that above this threshold economic agents may be able to protect themselves from inflation through credit technology and a more urbanized population and yet such high inflation adversely affects the influence of exports on economic growth. This noteworthy since a majority of government revenues is from trade activity via the country's affiliation with the Southern African Customs Union (SACU).

The major contribution of this paper is that it becomes the first to draw directly from endogenous growth theory to estimate the inflation threshold for any African country, which will hopefully pave a way for similar studies on other African countries.

The purpose of the study is to provide a bibliometric review of scientific articles published on “Income inequality in Africa” in order to understand the patterns of research on the topic and identify agendas for future research.

We conduct a bibliometric analysis on 459 research publications between 1993 and 2023 using the biblioshiny function of bibliometrix package of R-studio to map out and analyze the bibliometric data.

The findings from our analysis can be summarized in five points. Firstly, African researchers are underrepresented on a global scale and yet are dominant at institutional and author levels. Secondly, most dominant research has not being published in top 100 tanked economic journals. Thirdly, there is underrepresentation of females and white males in research output. Fourthly, there are weak author collaborations on the topic and currently the authors with higher collaborative partnerships tend to have more research output and higher citations. Lastly, we find that authors who include simple terms such as “Income inequality”, “Africa”, “poverty” and “economic growth” as keywords in their studies tend to have higher visibility.

This is first study to perform a bibliometric analysis for research on “Income inequality in Africa”.

The purpose of the study is to evaluate whether nighttime luminosity sourced from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System satellite sensors is a suitable proxy for measuring poverty in Africa.

Our study performs wavelet coherence analysis to investigate the time-frequency synchronization between the nightlight data and “income-to-wealth” ratio for 39 African countries between 1992 and 2012.

All-in-all, the authors find that approximately a third of African countries produce positive synchronizations between nighttime data and “income-to-wealth” ratio and hence conclude that most African countries are not at liberty to use nighttime data to proxy conventional poverty statistics.

In differing from previous studies, the authors examine the suitability of nightlight intensity as a proxy of poverty for individual African countries using much more rigorous analysis.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of human capital on economic growth for a selected sample of nine SSA countries between 1980 and 2014 using a panel econometric approach.

The authors estimate a log-linearized endogenous using the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and the dynamic ordinary least squares (POLS) applied to our panel data time series.

The empirical analysis shows an insignificant effect of human capital on economic growth for our selected sample. These findings remain unchanged even after adding interactive terms to human capital, which are representatives of government spending as well as foreign direct investment. Nevertheless, the authors establish a positive and significant effect of the interactive term between urbanization and human capital on economic growth.

The results emphasize the need for African policymakers to develop urbanized, “smart”, technologically driven cities within the SSA region as a platform toward strengthening the impact of human capital-economic growth relationship.

This study becomes the first in the literature to validate the human capital–urbanization–growth relationship for African countries.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate threshold effects in the persistence of South African aggregate inflation data.

The conventional approach for assessing the degree of persistence within an inflation process is via its integration properties. This study makes use of univariate threshold autoregressive (TAR) models and associated unit root testing procedures to investigate the integration properties of the inflation data. Out‐of‐sample forecasts are further performed for the TAR models and their linear counterparts.

The empirical results confirm threshold effects in the persistence of all employed aggregated measures of inflation, whereas such asymmetric effects are ambiguous for disaggregated inflation measures. None of the observed series is found to be stationary in their levels. The out‐of‐sample forecasts for all TAR models outperform their linear counterparts.

Given the scope of the study, the empirical analysis provides insight with concern to the performance of inflation subsequent to the adoption of the inflation target regime in South Africa. Of particular interest are the low persistence levels observed at inflation rates of below 4.7 and 4.4 percent for core and CPI inflation, respectively, as both these aggregated measures of inflation play an essential role in guiding monetary policy conduct within the economy. The overall findings imply that on an aggregate level, the South African Reserve Bank's (SARB's) current inflation target of 3‐6 percent encompasses a non‐stationary inflation range and thus proves to be restrictive on monetary policy conduct.

The paper fills in an important gap in the academic literature by evaluating asymmetric effects in the integration properties of inflation, at both aggregated and disaggregated levels, for the exclusive case of South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to examine asymmetric co-integration effects between nutrition and economic growth for annual South African data from the period 1961-2013.

The authors deviate from the conventional assumption of linear co-integration and pragmatically incorporate asymmetric effects in the framework through a fusion of the momentum threshold autoregressive and threshold error correction (MTAR-TEC) model approaches, which essentially combines the adjustment asymmetry model of Enders and Silkos (2001); with causality analysis as introduced by Granger (1969); all encompassed by/within the threshold autoregressive (TAR) framework, a la Hansen (2000).

The findings obtained from the study uncover a number of interesting phenomena for the South Africa economy. First, in coherence with previous studies conducted for developing economies, the authors establish a positive relationship between nutrition and economic growth with an estimated income elasticity of nutritional intake of 0.15. Second, the authors find bi-direction causality between nutrition and economic growth with a stronger causal effect running from nutrition to economic growth. Lastly, the authors find that in the face of equilibrium shocks to the variables, policymakers are slow to responding to deviations of the variables from their co-integrated long run steady state equilibrium.

In the study, the authors make a novel contribution to the literature by exploring asymmetric modelling in the correlation between nutrition intake and economic growth for the exclusive case of South Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate asymmetric cointegration and causality effects between financial development and economic growth for South African data spanning over the period of 1992-2013.

This study makes the use of the momentum threshold autoregressive (M-TAR) approach which allows for threshold error-correction (TEC) modeling and Granger causality analysis between the variables. In carrying out an empirical analysis, the author uses six measures of the financial development variables against gross domestic per capita, that is, three measures which proxy banking activity and another three proxies for stock market development.

The empirical results generally indicate an abrupt asymmetric cointegration relationship between banking activity and economic growth, on the one hand, and a smooth cointegration relationship between stock market activity and economic growth, on the other hand. Moreover, causality analysis generally reveals that while banking activity tends to Granger cause economic growth, stock market activity is, however, caused by economic growth increase.

This study contributes to the literature by examining asymmetries in the cointegration and causality relations by using both banking and stock market proxies against economic growth for the South African economy.

This study is a pre-COVID-19 exposition of the existing situation about external debt-GDP relationship, incorporating corruption into the hypothesis, making South Africa the object of the study. The aim is to examine the causal relationship between corruption, economic growth and external debt, and in the end proffer solutions to the problems arising therefrom.

The study employed ARDL technique on time series data running from 1990 to 2019 with real gross domestic product as the dependent variable and external debt, external debt servicing, corruption, inflation and capital formation as regressors. Necessary tests that include unit root, cointegration, CUSUM and CUSUMSq, normality, serial correlation and heteroscedasticity were performed on the model.

The study shows that corruption, inflation and external debt servicing exert negative influences on economic growth while the effect of investment on growth was positive. External debt's effect in the short run was positive while its long-run effect on growth was negative. Among other things, the need to improve and strengthen public institutions in addition to targeting tax evaders and avoiders for increased government revenue were emphasized.

The study incorporates corruption into the country specific debt-GDP debate as against earlier studies that excluded corruption in their time series analysis or that were cross-country based. The authors also exposit the existing knowledge of the debt-GDP hypothesis before the outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic. This is expected to serve as a precursor to subsequent studies on the rising debt of South Africa during and after the pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to review most recent developments of social and environmental accounting (SEA) in the context of developing countries and to offer insights for the latest research in this field. It also provides an introduction to the AAAJ special issue.

The authors have undertaken a conceptual overview of the field developed in the past two decades (2001–2020) with a view to identify major themes, trends and future research directions.

The overview reveals that only 43 SEA papers addressing contextual challenges of developing countries have been published in leading accounting journals in the last 20 years. The coverage of these publications is concentrated in a small number of countries and regions. Interdisciplinary accounting journals, especially AAAJ, are the main publishing outlets in this field. The topic areas are dominated by social accounting challenges, with much less focus on environmental accounting, although developing countries are particularly exposed to the threats of climate change, water pollution and biodiversity loss. The literature reviewed uses elaborating, problematising and theorising contexts as three main contextualisation approaches to analyse contextual themes framed around regulatory, political, cultural and religious, and social-economic systems. Although various conceptual lenses have been adopted in the developing country SEA literature, the use of institutional theory and its various extensions to address political and cultural complexities seems to become more prominent, as shown in most of the contributions included in this special issue.

This review is limited to leading accounting journals. SEA research increasingly published in other disciplines such as in management, social and environmental areas might provide a more comprehensive view in this research field.

In this paper, inter alia, the authors review and synthesise the previous literature in a conceptual framework, illustrating and highlighting the importance of contextual framing of SEA in developing countries. Based on this review, the authors propose some ideas for a future research agenda aiming to advance the field. The authors expect this paper and the special issue to act as a reference point for emerging SEA researchers from developing countries to raise more scholarly impactful enquiries in this area.