Welcome to PRISM

Policy Research on International Services and Manufacturing - PRISM

Head: Prof Mike Morris

PRISM has been launched within Saldru to fill a research gap in the School of Economics. By providing an interface between economics and other relevant disciplines it will provide a lens to focus research and policy work on industrialising countries around the following issues:

• Globalisation and the changing distribution of industrialisation,
• The impact of global value chains on growth and markets,
• China and other Asian drivers impact on industrialisation in Sub-Saharan Africa,
• Industrial policy in this new environment,
• Innovation and upgrading in developing countries,
• International competitiveness of firms and sectors,
• Clusters and learning networks,
• Trade and its impact on manufacturing and services,
• Regulatory frameworks for trade, services and sectors,
• The distributional gains of industrial growth,

PRISM is intended to operate as a broad and eclectic research network creating a community of researchers who coalesce around common research interests as well as resources, including data. It is meant to encourage them to share ideas, work-in-progress, and interact on common issues. It is intended to provide a focal point for post graduate students who have an interest in these issues to find a research home. PRISM will allow staff and students to interact around common themes, be a vehicle to publish working papers, encourage journal article publication, and team up to secure research contracts.

Recognising the important role that the availability of good data plays in stimulating research and sound policy work, PRISM will attempt to play a catalytic function in this respect. It will seek to create access to available sectoral, trade (quantitative and qualitative) data as well as other published relevant information to facilitate research. In order to provide data relevant for industrial analysis, it will foster partnerships with other agencies to facilitate the acquisition of new and existing data, encourage the collection of up-to-date survey data, and store this data to make this available to the public research domain.

Whilst the intended geographical spread of work is designed to be broad, the research and policy focus is intended to remain grounded in South Africa and the rest of the continent. The objective is to create a critical mass in the School of Economics, providing a space to incorporate like minded researchers in other departments (e.g. in the commerce faculty and the GSB), as well interactive links with other institutions (such as HSRC) in the Western Cape. This will then also provide a focal point for researchers, institutions and consulting groups in other parts of the world to network with. In this way it will put PRISM firmly on the map as the centre of excellence in Southern Africa for research and policy work on international services and manufacturing.