The Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) will be hosting the first Economic Research Advisory Network (ERAN) annual conference on the theme ‘Driving South Africa's Industrial Development Agenda’.
Interested parties are invited to submit their title and abstracts of up to 250 words via e-mail to eran@thedti.gov.za. Deadline for submissions is 13 November 2015.
The conference will be held on 10-11 March 2016 in Port Elizabeth.
The context of the conference is:
With the advent of democracy in 2007, South Africa’s posture on industrial development has been anchored on a path embracing industrial development planning and support. Our country’s reindustrialisation efforts have been largely driven by the National Industrial Policy Framework (NIPF) through various iterations of the Industrial Policy Action Plan (IPAP). Our industrial policy has been successful in improving the international competitiveness of the manufacturing sector as evidenced in the marked increase in exports. However, the contribution of the manufacturing sector to growth and employment creation has been disappointing. Therefore, current government policy seeks to ensure a restructuring of the economy to set it on a more value-adding, labour-intensive and environmentally sustainable growth path. Sustainable long-term development should be underpinned by higher growth, exports and labour-intensive, value-adding economic activity in the production sectors, led by manufacturing. It is widely and increasingly acknowledged that manufacturing should play the critical role in this adjusted model of economic development. The economy is not made up of a set of discrete and isolated activities, but a range of primary and secondary sectors that are fundamentally interlinked and mutually supportive, requiring carefully calibrated, interlocking interventions. The New Growth Path (NGP), NIPF and successive IPAPs have consistently made the point that manufacturing has a vital role to play in driving up employment and growth in the economy. It has also been stressed that industrial policy should be framed and driven by a particular focus on value-adding sectors that embody a combination of relatively high employment and growth multipliers. As measured through backward linkages, manufacturing sectors ‘pull through’ inputs from primary and other manufacturing and services sectors and transform them into high-value products, stimulating employment along the entire value chain. These sectors provide an additional impetus to employment and growth through forward linkages to ‘downstream’ sectors, predominantly in services. Manufacturing companies depend on service providers for production in IT, financial services, travel and security etc. In this sense, manufacturing ‘creates demand’ for services inputs and plays an increasingly central role in transforming the economy. This positive dynamic, which is a combination of direct and indirect effects, must be developed and deepened if South Africa is to achieve the necessary step change towards mitigating and eventually overcoming the serious structural imbalances that characterise the economy. This highlights a need to assess how existing policy instruments and incentives (and their application) currently contribute to the creation of an enabling environment in support of the objectives of increased productive capacity and inclusive growth. This includes fiscal incentives, preferential procurement and localisation, technical regulations, technology transfer, Rand D support, skills development, trade, investment and market development support.
ERAN is therefore hosting a conference entitled Driving South Africa’s Industrialisation Agenda to explore some of these issues and draw practical lessons on improving the economic landscape in South Africa. It is structured around four key thematic working areas, which determine the key focus areas for the conference:
Themes are: Corporate and Consumer Regulations; Reducing barriers to entry and making competition policy developmental; Ensuring policy coherence and certainty through coordinated implementation; Inclusive growth; Role of the state and the private sector in inclusive growth; Measures for ensuring inclusive economic development and industrialisation; Industrial development; Finance for industrial policy - the role of DFIs and FDI; Sustainable industrial development models and the role of local government; Trade and Investment; Inclusive export-led reindustrialisation; and Supporting exporter development and market opportunities.