Exciting speakers lined up for Centenary webinar

The Department's Centenary webinar, scheduled for 9 October 13:30 to 16:00, will feature Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee as the keynote speaker. Professor Banerjee is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among numerous prestigious positions. He is widely regarded as an authoritative thinker in development economics, and in particular the use of randomised controlled experiments in field settings, for which he was winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019, along with his two co-researchers Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer. Many of our Department's researchers, particularly in the ReSEP, are intimately involved in the same types of research questions, such as the measurement of school quality's effect in educational outcomes, so Prof Banerjee's address will be a fitting celebration for the Department's centenary. The topic of his address, scheduled to start at 15:00, is "Good Economics for hard times".

The webinar will also feature a roundtable discussion on "The South African economy", obviously a vital topic in our current national circumstances. The discussants includes current Minister of Finance (and Honorary Professor), Tito Mboweni, along with Profs Rachel Jafta, Haroon Borat, Sizwe Nxedlana and Nicola Theron as moderator.

The full programme for the webinar (9 October) is:

• 13:30 Welcoming (Stan du Plessis)

The department: past and present (Andrie Schoombee)
The department: the future (Ada Jansen)

• 14:00 – 15: 00  Roundtable discussion: The South African economy (Tito Mboweni, Rachel Jafta, Haroon Borat, Sizwe Nxedlana, with Nicola Theron as moderator)

• 15:00 - 16:00 Keynote address: Good Economics for hard times (Abhijit Banerjee)

Click here to register for the webinar on Zoom.