Of course one of the critical things in this regard is that when we have involved a whole range of
government departments at national level, we would by false logical extension think that they'll cascade that information to their colleagues and counterparts at local level; maybe a wrong logical extension but not unreasonable.
The other thing that we would do is to ... as I said ... involve as many academics as possible drawn from the universities around the country, who should also ... I hope ... have conversations with their students and their research assistance to try and get this intellectual conversation going and build on some of the well-tested modelling capacity around the world so that there should be some modelling capacity even at provincial and local level, for example, municipalities needs to be able to model very well the future revenue growth; model very well the potential local economic development by doing research and making assumptions and feeding them into the model and get some results. So, when they plan for the economic development of their municipality, they are also informed by research and also by technical modelling. I think that is how you get the system going.
There is a bit of a weakness in the South African academic institutions, which I think we have to pay attention to. The Human Sciences Research Council, HSRC, the Foundation for Research and
Development, FRD, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, CSIR, the National Treasury, the SA Reserve Bank, Statistics SA and so on, we will really have to put a lot of focus on the academic development at our universities.
If I want to interact with a professor of economics at the University of Limpopo, I should be able to do that - but who is it? So, we must focus on that.
We say that agriculture is going to be critical for us going forward and so is tourism. Do we have a sufficient focus at our universities on agriculture and research? We have the Agricultural Research Council, ARC. What about the universities? Are we galvanising all the research work? This is what we hope to come out of this programme so that we can really build up the intellectual capacity.
By the way, one of the things hon member that I am hoping we can put together by mid-year, next year ... if it doesn't happen, don't burn me at the stake ... it is the creation of a national bureau of economic research, which will bring together all these research institutes. Academics will be compensated as per their peer-reviewed paper, which hopefully will contribute further to the number of papers that we can put together.
I can assure you hon member that there are many research papers on our website, the website of Department of Trade and Industry, the website of the SA Reserve Bank and the website of Statistics SA. I think the effort is good and we should continue to interact with that effort.
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