Director’s Statement

Economic Research Southern Africa (ERSA) aims to both broaden the scope of economic research in Southern Africa, and to deepen its quality to ensure greater international exposure of research conducted in Southern Africa. Serving this, ERSA provides development and training, the opportunity for publication, contributions to economic debate and forums for networking.

Under the Skills Development program, 3 workshops were held: Cohort 8 – Time Series Economics and Cohort 7 and 8 – Cross Section Econometrics. These workshops successfully covered intermediate economic techniques, with the attendants predominantly from historically disadvantaged institutions. The Graduate Training Program provided one course on advanced academic techniques and issues: Advanced Empirical Methods in Finance and Economics. Many of the workshops are returning to in-person engagements, resulting in higher unit costs than in the last two years. While the online format remains an important platform with significant opportunity to reach a broader audience and reduce costs, there are several challenges that remain important. Access to information technology, load shedding and poor access to quality Wi-Fi can be disruptive and undermines the learning opportunities, especially for the financially disadvantaged students. Related to this, access to statistical and similar programs is a challenge which needs to be seriously considered going forward. The online format does not easily lend itself to engagement between participants, potentially weakening a key learning opportunity in these workshops.

The Working Paper Series continues to be a central pillar of strength in terms of ERSA’s activities and remains an important contribution to the development of research as well as academic opportunity. In the past year ERSA has chosen to only publish working papers that are within its stated research themes and to remove the financial incentive for successful journal publication. As a result, the number of submissions has fallen, but quality and alignment with themes remains strong.

A new Research Committee was established towards the end of the year, with Steve Koch (University of Pretoria) as the chair. The Committee is expected to support ERSA in establishing a stronger pipeline of commissioned research projects and papers for publication. As this reform matures, the volume of working papers and discussion documents is expected to increase.

The Workshop series produced a total of 7 events, which yielded participation from international and local scholars as well as international and local policy stakeholders. The events included the Second University of Pretoria Economics PhD Workshop, which brought together PhD and other post- graduate students, academics and practitioners. This was a forum for the students to present and receive comments and feedback on their work. A Macroeconomics workshop on Research and Modelling was presented by Professor Junior Maih (Norges Bank, Norway). This was a well-attended workshop which focussed on economic foundations of macroeconomic models and how they relate to policy issues. An in-person workshop on Competition Policy and Regulation in Digital Markets was a series of lectures on relevant competition and regulatory issues in digital markets. The SAMNET workshop on Emerging Markets was a collaboration between ERSA, University of Pretoria and the CEPR. The objective was to create a regular appointment for international and national research community to present their most recent work and to discuss important economic policy issues confronting emerging markets. ERSA collaborated with the Climate Vulnerability forum and the V-20 Group as a Regional Partner in 2023. The aim was to deepen the debate on how South African economies are affected by Climate Change, to encourage researchers to use the Data Explorer Indicators in their research and to make policy makers aware of the issues and the resources that can be used to understand the issues. ERSA assisted the Brookings Institute with the dissemination of their Foresight Africa 2023 Report titled A Southern African Perspective. This event presented as a hybrid panel discussion with an interactive question and answer session.

This year, ERSA has introduced Discussion Documents as a broad category of non-technical reviews and summaries designed to be read by a wider audience than the Working Papers. The series started with a group of research on basic income support, followed by documents on the impact of the FATF grey listing, the forces influencing the yield curve, and global experience with youth employment programs. As governance and quality assurance systems are strengthened, it is envisioned that these will become increasingly important outputs for ERSA.

In conclusion, the building blocks to develop ERSA’s contribution to a broad and diverse audience of interested users are firmly in place. The established business of ERSA remains solid and will continue to evolve to provide its best contribution to deepening and improving the quality of research in the region. The challenge for the organisation is enhancing its role in informing a broader audience and increasing its contribution to economic policy debates.

The foundation of the working paper series provides a solid and extremely valuable contribution to the economics academy on which to build bridges to the broad community of interested users. Webinars, podcasts, policy briefs/bulletins, and our engagements with social media have developed over the past year to provide the technology through which those bridges can be built.

Going forward, initiatives to formalise a cohesive work program based on current and policy- relevant issues, adequate financial resourcing, high-quality and diverse academic inputs, and accessible communication initiatives aimed at the right audiences are to be strengthened. This will put in place a formal pipeline of research and policy-relevant outputs aimed at servicing the organisation’s mandate.

Matthew Simmonds
Executive Director