Business Day - 29 October 2003

THE World Trade Organisation (WTO) was, and largely remains, developing countries' best hope for mitigating the uneven power relations between large developed nations and small developing countries in the trading environment.

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Business Day - 28 October 2003

THE South African economy has experienced significant trade reforms in the past decade...

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Business Day - 16 September 2003

SHOULD SA have an inflation cap on increases in administered prices? The Reserve Bank, MPs and others have fingered administered prices as an inflation culprit. Tariff increases implemented by public entities, in sectors such as telecommunications, electricity and transport, have run ahead of the inflation target range, putting upward pressure on prices and undermining efforts to bring inflation down to within the range...

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Business Day - 9 September 2003

SA's manufacturing performance since the 1990s has been below par and the trade and industry department's incentive strategies to boost the sector have not been effective, according to the department's former chief economist...

Business Day- 10 May 2003

A RESEARCH paper by a trade and industry think-tank has echoed the urgent need to create more jobs in the country. The paper, published by Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (Tips), showed a drop in employment across all industrial sectors except one from 1990 to 2001...

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Finance24 - 3 September 2003

South Africa's socio- economic performance since 1994 will come under the spotlight at a forum to be held in Johannesburg next week...

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Mail & Guardian - 21 October 2006

Robert Pollin, Jerry Epstein, James Heintz and Leonce Ndikumana of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, US presented brief highlights of the major proposals from their recently published book An Employment Targeted Economic Programme for South Africa at the 2006 Forum. Pollin is a director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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Business Day - 20 October 2006

Efforts by Transnet and Eskom to promote the development of local suppliers of capital goods for their infrastructure programmes aimed to address the real risk that parastatals might struggle to source some of the items they need on global markets, and would not delay the infrastructure roll out, the official responsible for driving the supplier programme said this week. The public enterprise department's Edwin Ritchken was speaking at a conference on accelerated and shared growth in SA, hosted by the University of Cape Town's Development Policy Research Unit and TIPS (Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies).

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Business Report - 20 October 2006

The release of important economic data always makes headlines. But Corne van Walbeek, a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town (UCT), warned yesterday that the statistical authorities and the financial press should treat initial releases with caution. Van Walbeek, of UCT's school of economics, raised the issue in a paper presented at a conference arranged by the Development Policy Research Unit [and Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies].

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24 October 2006

Even if South Africa is to create new jobs in the period leading up to 2015, this is unlikely to make a major dent in reducing poverty. This emerged as the central policy question (aside from differences over the extent of poverty) during a debate on poverty and inequality at last week's Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies and the University of Cape Town Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) conference.

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24 October 2006

Johannesburg - The presidency has commissioned the country's first national income study to help the government get a better understanding of the extent of poverty. The study, which gets under way next year, is an acknowledgment that poverty remains a central issue. The national income dynamic study will be conducted by the SA Labour Development Research Unit (Saldru) based at the University of Cape Town (UCT), rather than by Statistics SA or the Human Sciences Research Council. The study will track 8 000 households indefinitely to provide policy makers with a better understanding of the dynamics of poverty.

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This paper investigates the relationship between education and unemployment in post-apartheid South Africa, and probes the argument that employment growth has been inhibited particularly by skills constraints. We use probit regression analysis to show that higher education protected against unemployment in both 1995 and 2003, and that overall, the relative…

Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by public sector investment, non-linearities generating the possibility of infrastructure overprovision,…

This paper empirically contributes towards the debate between the human capital and screening theories. Using South Africa's September 2004 Labour Force Survey data, and after controlling for self-selection, the weak and strong versions of screening hypothesis are tested. The honour's degree, and certificates or diplomas got without grade twelve, provide…

Description Aimed at Researchers and Policy-Makers, this was an applied trade bargaining course developed to fulfil the role of preparing countries for the new round of trade negotiations. Participants were given readings to familiarise them with the WTO, its processes and the issues that will be negotiated. Abstract The World…

A short course presented by TIPS & UCT School of Economics 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…

An interactive session on the WTO: Globalization: The WTO and Sustainable Development. Guest Speaker : Mike Moore Director General of the WTO)

Competition Law governs the nature and extent of competitive interaction among firms in all industries. It prohibits certain types of interaction and provides for a rule of reason approach to the assessment of the impact of other types of behaviour on competition. Economic principles therefore underpin this legislation. A sound…

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…

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.