There is more to the internet than "Google". There are a number of economic journal databases, as well as websites that will provide you with free access to economic journals and working papers that have been published in the past 10 - 15 years.

Important: Should you in any way use information from any of these articles, please be sure to reference your source in order to avoid plagiarism. For information on correct referencing methodologies please visit the Guidelines section. Under no circumstances will plagiarism be tolerated and any entries displaying plagiarism will be immediately disqualified.

Please click here if you experience any difficulties in downloading any of the articles.

 

GENERAL SITES

 

• REPEC is a searchable database that gives you access to journal articles and working papers, mostly free of charge. These articles are sourced from the IMF, universities and economic think tanks. Type key words into the search function and it will bring up a list of relevant articles. The abstract of each article is provided. Read the abstract and decide whether it will be relevant to your research. If you want to download it, click on the article and on the following page click on "download this article".Click here to go to the site http://ideas.repec.org

 

• The National Bureau of Economic Research provides free access to the latest research by many American universities. The website is updated every week and you can subscribe free of charge to their mailing list. This will help keep you up to date with the latest research. The website also has a search facility which will enable you to search their database. Type in key words and when it delivers the results, go to Publications. Click here to go to the site http://www.nber.org

 

• The International Monetary Fund provides a range of topical economic research, from inflation targeting and exchange rates to competitiveness and much more.  Go to Publications and then search for articles by key words. Click here to go to the site http://www.imf.org

 

• Harvard on South Africa: a group of Harvard economists, in conjunction with local academics were employed to conduct research on the key challenges facing the South African economy. Click here to go to the site http://www.cid.harvard.edu/southafrica

 

• Eldis is a site that aims to share the best in development, policy, practice and research. It provides development-focused research from organisations such as UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) as well as development banks. They have extensive research on trade-related research. Click here to go to the site http://www.eldis.org

 

• The Centre for the Study of African Economies provides research on the South African economy, including work by Janine Aron on inflation targeting as well as research on exports by Neil Rankin. Click here to go to the site http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk

 

• The Trade and Industry Policy Secretariat conducts research on trade and industrial policy for South Africa and the SADC region. Click here to go to the site http://www.tips.org.za

 

• Click on these other useful websites:

http://www.doingbusiness.org

http://www.worldbank.org

http://www.uneca.org

 

 POSTGRADUATE LINKS

 From an Adjudicator’s perspective, the first thing a candidate can do to improve their chances of getting through is to do some original data analysis; as a bare minimum they should include their own graphs that are up to date.  (It’s very off-putting to see a student copy/pasting a graph that is only up to 2006 and then drawing conclusions based on historical data).

 

The South Africa Reserve Bank website has all the SA data from the Quarterly Bulletin freely available for anyone to download in Excel. Simply go to http://www.sarb.co.za  and then find the link for publications and research. Then go online to statistical queries.

 

For international data, including South African data, you can go to International Financial Statistics:
http://www.imfstatistics.org/imf/

 

A once-off five-day free trial is available and is a very useful source of general macroeconomic data.

 

The Reserve Bank of Australia, EUROSTAT, and the Organisation for Economic Development as well as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis all have either free international or domestic data.

  

UNDERGRADUATE LINKS

 

This site is fantastic, gives lots of references as well as data and other information on growth and inequality:  http://growth.blogs.ilrt.org/references/inequality-and-growth/

This is the link for the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development:
http://econ.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=64165259&theSitePK=469372&piPK=64165421&menuPK=64166093&entityID=000112742_20050920110826

 

The link below also provides some more general reading: 
 
http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTWDR2006/0,,contentMDK:20232899~menuPK:477651~pagePK:64167689~piPK:64167673~theSitePK:477642,00.html

Important: Should you in any way use information from any of these articles, please be sure to reference your source in order to avoid plagiarism. For information on correct referencing methodologies please visit the Guidelines section.