Reducing Exchange Rate Volatility and Supporting Competitiveness
Co-ordinators
Prof. Dr. E. Schaling
Prof. Dr. E. Schaling studied macroeconomics at the Faculty of Economic and Business Administration at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, currently Europe's number one faculty in terms of research output.
After obtaining his doctorate at the same university with a thesis entitled 'Institutions and Monetary Policy: Credibility, Flexibility and Central Bank Independence', he joined the Monetary Analysis Division of the Bank of England. In 1998 he moved to South Africa and became full Professor of Economics at the University of Johannesburg.
He has been a consultant to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Dutch Central Bank, the Bank of Finland and the European Central Bank. He is a fellow at the Center for Economic Research at Tilburg University and at the Centre for Dynamic Macroeconomic Analysis, University of St. Andrews in the UK. In South Africa he has been an adviser to the National Treasury, to the South African Reserve Bank, to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Finance, the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) and to the Presidency.
Dr. Schaling was appointed, in 2007, South African Reserve Bank Chair at the University of Pretoria.
Nicola Viegi
Nicola Viegi is an Associate Professor in economics at the University of Cape Town. A graduate from the Scottish Doctoral Programme in Economics, he has been a lecturer in economics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, invited lecturer at the University of Malta and the Ecole Superior de Commerce in Toulouse and is currently Visiting Scholar at De Nederlandsche Bank . He studied economics at the University of Pisa in Italy. Before UCT, he was a senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
His main areas of research are economic policy theory, macroeconomic modelling and regional macroeconomic integration. Current research includes inflation targeting under uncertainty, monetary policy and asset prices, and macroeconomic integration in Southern Africa.