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Fiscal policy ensures macroeconomic stability as a precondition for growth at the macro level. This study investigates the impact of fiscal policy on economic growth of South Africa from 1960 to 2014 through a Cointegrated Vector Autoregression approach. It seeks to contribute to the existing literature as well as in designing effective fiscal policy programmes which can propel economic performance. Theresults of the long run estimates revealed that government tax revenue has a positive and significant long run influence on economic growth, whereas the government gross fixed capital formation and budget deficit have a negative impact on real GDP. For that reason, the study recommends that some expansionary fiscal policy measures should be strengthened since they play a very important role in the economy so as to meet the government target of the National Development Plan Vision for 2030.

The study examined how oil price changes affect Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflow in South Africa. The study used annual quantitative data, obtained from the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and World Bank development indicators. With the exception of real exchange rate, Augmented Dicky Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Peron (PP) tests for stationarity indicated variables become stationary after first differencing. Stationarity test results suggested application of ARDL bounds test for cointegration. ARDL bounds test for co-integration confirms that variables of the study have long-run relationship with F-statistic of 6.59, which is higher than the lower (2.98) and upper (3.78) boundaries at least 5% level of significance.  In the long - run oil prices coefficient found to have negative and significant influence in foreign direct investment inflows during 1980-2020 period. Empirical results provide practical implications for South Africa, as oil importing country can hedge crude oil price changes to maintain future quantity of crude oil to be imported. The study recommends expansion of renewable energy sources to reduce South Africa’s vulnerability to oil price fluctuations. Moreover, since oil prices are exogenously determined, setting up forward looking institutions such as sovereign wealth funds and short- term stabilization funds will be better.

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The paper analyzed the impact of financial market shocks on financial market stability. The goal was achieved by employing quarterly time-series data spanning from 2003:Q1 to 2020:Q4. The study used various econometric techniques such as stationarity, determining optimal lag length, cointegration analysis, estimating a vector error correction model, impulse response functions and forecast error variance decomposition. Following this, the long run relationship amongst the variables was established. The findings revealed that inflation has a negative impact on financial stability in both the short and long run. Lastly, it was only the shocks in economic activities that was found to have a significant impact on financial stability.