SARB highlights for 2017

The South African Reserve Bank Chair in Monetary Policy Studies is the result of decade old collaboration between the SARB and the University of Pretoria aimed at promoting research and learning in the fields of monetary economics and macroeconomics. This year the collaboration has been renewed for a further period of five years and its scope and dimension has been expanded, providing an opportunity to develop a Centre of Excellence for Graduate Studies in Monetary Policy Studies. The mission of the Chair is to promote research and develop a long-term research strategy in collaboration with the Research Department at the SARB. The collaboration also provides  research and policy engagement opportunities for talented South African students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are willing to specialize in the field of monetary economics and central banking.

The Chair is now in the process of recruiting Post-Doctoral fellows who will form the backbone of the Chair’s research capacity. The position has proven to be particularly appealing to recent graduates from all over the world. The combination of high-level research and policy engagement is a unique characteristic of the Chair’s functions and is clearly appealing to young scholars interested in policy-relevant research.

In collaboration with the SARB, the Chair is planning four research workshops next year. In February Maria Demertzis, deputy director at Bruegel, one of the most important think thanks in Europe, will open a workshop on “Resilience” where we will discuss how to make policy and the economy robust to the uncertainty the we are experiencing nationally and internationally. In May, Matteo Maggiori, from Harvard University, will open a workshop on the exchange rate determination and control, one of the recurrent themes in South African policy debates. In the second part of the year we are planning further workshops on South African inflation determination and forecasting macroeconomic variables in South Africa.

The Chair is also promoting an internship program for our graduate students at the SARB and other policy institutions, to connect closely our learning programs with the questions arising from the policy process. Recently one of our graduates, Tumisang Loate, spent six months in the SARB research department working on a project evaluating the effect of international financial cycles on the South African monetary policy. Another graduate, Vincent Dadam, after spending three months at the IMF in Washington, is now conducting research for the South African section of the World Bank, on the South African Country Diagnostic report for 2018.

Overall, the Chair will use the expanded resources to become the point of reference for graduate studies in macroeconomic policy studies, to increase the interaction between academia and policy-making and to promote an academic culture of rigorous policy engagement.