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This paper inspects whether the South Africa Reserve Bank’s (SARB) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) statements trigger have a causality with newspaper reports from the Mail and Guardian between 2010 and 2021. The study examines whether SARB’s post MPC statements’ readability is reciprocated in the subsequent Mail and Guardian newspaper articles. Using the Flesch Reading Ease Score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score as the methodology, there is a systematic unpacking of both SARB’s MPC statements and newspaper reports from the Mail and Guardian which yield a dataset which is subsequently used to create a computation. This computation is then used to examine whether SARB’s MPC statements Granger cause the subsequent Mail and Guardian newspaper articles. Resultantly, the results show that there is no Granger causality between the SARB’s MPC statements and the Mail and Guardian’s Flesch Reading Ease Score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score.

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) migrated to inflation targeting in 2000 and has since embarked on a trajectory of transparency. This has taken the shape of releasing Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) statements other forms of communication. This paper examines SARB’s MPC statements’ tone and sentiment between 2000 and 2021 using the Besigye-Segawa’s TextBlob polarity and subjectivity calculator which measures central bank communication tone and sentiment using the Loughran-McDonald dictionary’s word classification to gauge polarity and subjectivity. The study goes on to explore causality of SARB’s MPC statements’ tone and sentiment on inflation expectation results from the Bureau of Economic (BER) results survey. The systematic analysis shows a causality of SARB’s MPC statements’ tone and sentiment on succeeding BER’s inflation expectations results therein justifying the need for effective communication as SARB’s MPC communications’ polarity and subjectivity ultimately have a causal effect on inflation expectations. therein justifying the need for effective communication. As central bank tone and sentiment studies are only emerging in many emerging and frontier markets, this study lays a foundation for future exploration of effects of central bank communication on the expectations channel.

This article reflects on social welfare system and governance of housing markets from an end-user perspective. The article criticallyanalyses the way in which social welfare has correlated to unsustainable development and created self entitlement behaviours andattitudes in the South African low income housing market. The phenomenon was demonstrable by empirical research whosefindings confirmed an existence of an association between a fully subsidized social housing model (as underpinned by South Africa’s social welfare) and propensity to default on mortgages. The study found that the risk of default by homeowners in the low income housing market in South Africa is influenced by government’s housing grant model. In other words, the research established that the principle of servicing a mortgaged starter property (that is almost similar to a government free house by both structure and design) is not universally accepted by homeowners of these mortgaged houses. The unintended consequences are that the system has created indefinite expectations that potentially could; (i) erode the country’s balance sheet; (ii) add to non-payment behaviour; (iii) pressurize the economic and credit systems; (iv) propagate entitlement attitudes and mindsets; (v) create social instability and (v) widened the country’s balance of payment deficits.