Timuno, Sayed Obonye Mboki (PhD)
Sayed Timuno holds a BA (Economics) from the University of Botswana, and an MA Economics from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He is currently on leave from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development of Botswana where he is a principal macroeconomist responsible for economic analysis and producing various forecasts such as quarterly GDP, quarterly fiscal and exchange rate projections. He has built various economic models in Botswana such as the Botswana quarterly econometric model, the financial programming and policy framework, and medium term fiscal framework. He was also a member of the team responsible for Botswana’s computable general equilibrium model. Timuno is currently based at the Macroeconomic and Financial Management Institute of Eastern Southern Africa (MEFMI) in Harare, Zimbabwe where he is programme manager tasked with developing macroeconomic models for central banks and ministries of finance in 14 MEFMI member states. The thesis presents three papers with a common theme of analysing fiscal policy in Botswana. Firstly, a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is used to propose a fiscal stimulus that can be adopted given the slowing productivity in the mining sector. Secondly, an autoregressive distributed lag technique is used to analyse how fiscal policy impacts total factor productivity (TFP) growth in various economic sectors. Finally, the structural vector autoregression model is employed to analyse how changes in macroeconomic variables affect government spending. With this study, the candidate makes significant contribution to fiscal policy. He finds short-term macroeconomic vulnerabilities arising from a mineral productivity shock to be minimised by cutting labour taxes, while TFP growth can be increased by taking into account of specific impacts that fiscal policy has on sectoral TFP growth. Targeted policies towards each expenditure component were found to improve expenditure management.
Supervisor: Prof JH Eita
70
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker