Money Supply and Economic Activity in South Africa – the Relationship Updated To 2011
This paper reconsiders the relationship between measures of money and measures of economic activity in the South African economy and the role of the Reserve Bank in moderating South African economic cycles. By using data for the past twenty years, the earlier analysis is updated and reassessed so that it is possible to see if the fundamental relationships between money, credit and economic activity have changed and whether the role of the Reserve Bank in managing economic activity has become more pivotal and constructive. One important difference noted is that broadly defined money (M3) does better in explaining economic activity between 2000 and 2011 than narrowly defined money. The opposite is true for the earlier sub-periods. The paper utilises a model of the money supply process to explain why the relationship between narrowly and broadly defined money changed after the year 2000 with regulations that encouraged the banks to reduce their demands for cash leading to an increase in the money multiplier. The paper concludes that the ability of the SA Reserve Bank to moderate the money and bank credit cycles, utilising interest rates as the primary instrument of monetary policy, remains as elusive as ever.
The South African Economy And Its Asset Markets
This paper considers the development and estimation of a structural econometric model of the South African economy by attempting to identify the most important forces and feed back effects that link the real South African economy to the global economy and asset markets. The model developed captures the relationships between an important set of South African economic variables including the domestic share and housing markets with a relatively small number of equations, but despite the simplicity of its structure, it is shown that the model can consistently forecast the growth rate turning points of these variables up to one-year ahead. The out of period forecasts of the model compare favourably to those of 2 naive time series models. The model is distinctive in that it incorporates wealth effects, proxied by the cycle of the domestic share market and domestic housing market, to help explain the growth in private consumption and investment spending and incorporates important feed back loops between the balance of payments, interest rates and the growth in the money supply.
Gill diseases of cultured salmonids in Ontario.
Between 1977 and 1981, the Fish Pathology Laboratory of the Ontario Veterinary College received 239 cases from trout farms of southern Ontario, 51 (21.3%) of which had diseased gills. Branchial lesions in 86.3% of these 51 cases were characterized by marked lamellar epithelial hyperplasia with epithelial hypertrophy and lamellar fusion. Filamentous bacteria were seen on the surface of the branchial filaments and lamellae in 68.6% of the cases. Our observations highlight the importance of gill diseases as a production problem of farmed salmonids in southern Ontario.