No further information is available for this event.

The World Bank releases an annual report called the Global Economic Prospects and Developing Countries. The team leader of this report Ataman Aksoy from the World Bankgave a seminar on this report at TIPS. He then presented a brief overview of the report, and talked about some of the outstanding and new trade issues and the work being done now in World bank and other agencies.

No Further information is available.

The South African economy has undergone drastic changes since the establishment of democracy in 1994. The new Government embarked on the following restructuring process comprising of the following: macroeconomic stability; trade liberalisation; foreign exchange control reform; privatisation; deregulation of certain sectors and the establishment of sector-specific regulators; a revamped competition regime and a general move away from market distorting; demand-side measures to efficiency enhancing; and supply side measures.

See Annual Forum papers

Whilst most economic course work focuses either on macroeconomic relationships or on their micro foundations, at the practical level of public sector policy analysts and policy makers, considerable attention is paid to the intermediate or meso level of economic analysis. Key sector analysis, sectoral impact studies, partial and general equilibrium trade and industry analysis are frequently conducted both in the public as well as the private sector.

An often used tool to conduct meso-level economic enquiry is input-output analysis usually extended by means of social accounting matrices. Although it is likely that only few public sector policy analysts will actually employ on a full time basis such analysis, there are currently only a handful of input-output and social accounting matrix practitioners in South Africa, many will nevertheless during their active career come across reports and applications, in which results of such analysis are presented.

In the light of the above TIPS in association with UCT's School of Economics and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is considering a week long course on input-output/social accounting matrix multiplier analysis during the second week of July 2001. Although it will be part of the Masters program at UCT's school of economics, the course will be stand alone and cover topics such as building the underlying data base from disparate data sources, national accounts consistency, descriptive analysis and snapshot pictures of the economy at hand, multipliers and their interpretation, simple policy applications with a social accounting matrix, the price model, short comings of simple multiplier analysis.

The course will be conducted at UCT's computer lab, with hand on instructions. The working platform will be the MS Excel spreadsheet software and participants are expected to have a solid understanding of its functionality. The course will be concluded with a short group assignment and presentation. The course instructors will be supplied by staff member of the Trade and Macroeconomics Division of IFPRI ( http://www.ifpri.cgiar.org/ ).

The objective of the workshop was to present preliminary results from two studies carried out in South Africa as part of a UK Department for International Development funded research project which has been looking at the impact of globalisation on poverty in four countries (Bangladesh, Kenya, South Africa and Vietnam).

The aim of this seminar was to develop a rigorous economic framework to evaluate the SMME sector in South Africa. There is a rich tradition of SMME work in SA and our aim was not to simply reproduce another SMME report. Instead, to date the synergies between the mainstream economy and the SMME sector have been rather weak and the aim of the project was to simply contextualise the SMME sector in the larger economic debate in the country.

Jean-Jacques Laffont, Director of Institut De Economie Industrielle, Toulouse, and Professor of Economics at University of Toulouse and University of Southern California, Los Angeles, gave a lecture on the Political Economy of Competition and Regulation of Network Industries.

The aim of the Annual Forum was to focus on major economic problems in the region and to evaluate the role of global integration therein. Taking stock of the economy is an important starting point for any serious discussion of globalisation. The Annual Forum will focussed primarily on the South African economy, but experts from the greater Southern African region and abroad also contributed