 We actually involved in this very exciting project. It's looking at micro-firm data within South Africa, and it's a particularly, it's an interesting database that links firm income tax data with employment data and trade data. And our particular interest in this data is to try and understand how South African firms, manufacturing firms in particular, integrate with the global environment. Now our angle is to try and understand how these firms draw on imports and our imports are closely associated with their firm performance and their outcomes. So commonly in this area within South Africa, imports are regarded as a competitive force that drive unemployment and drive jobs out. We're taking the angle, we're trying to look at how imports actually complement domestic production. They're a rich source of inputs, they're a rich source of technology embodied in inputs. They change the way firms behave, and we want to try and understand this relationship from a complementarity perspective and try and see it how it enforces or influences firm outcomes. Well it's not new globally, but within South Africa the lack of firm data has meant that most analysis, most assessment of policies, most assessment of industries are based on very aggregated industry level data. And that means that the story is really around the big firms. And when we know about international literature nowadays, these firms are very heterogeneous. There's lots of variation. Firms differ enormously with in-sectors as well as between sectors. So trying to get an understanding of the firm insight I think adds a particular nuance and understanding that the industry level analysis hasn't been conducted. So it's going to generate new insights on South Africa. I think another reason why it's particularly interesting for us in within South Africa is the way that firms are producing this global fragmentation of production, the emergence of global value chains means that the firm's engagement with the international environment has changed. So nowadays from an industry perspective we don't need to build the whole industrial structure, the whole value added chain, but firms can slot into different compartments, which really means they're slotting into buying imports from some source and they're locking into a downstream production chain through exports as well. So we wanted to look at that new role that the South African firms may be playing within that. I mean, there are other reasons as well. I mean, within our particular focus is we're looking at our imports influence firm productivity. And firm productivity is a key contribution to economic growth. But we're also actually interested in how imports complement the type of workers. So one of the key constraints we face in South Africa is a very high unemployment rate. Also there's strong concerns about the high degree of the skill bias within the employment structure. So one question we're thinking a little bit about is how does access to imports complement workers? Which workers does it complement? Does it complement skilled workers? In which case it could pose particular challenges to our employment problem. Are we seeing the unskilled workers being outsourced offshore to foreign production? So this element we haven't yet focused on but it's a key aspect that we're trying to think through. Again, what's the relationship between input and sources of inputs and the type of workers that you use within the manufacturing process? Well, we've got some provisional results. What we do find is that firms and trading firms are very different from non-trading firms. And more interestingly, within trading firms you've got large variation. So if we look at firms that just export, these are very different to firms that export and import. So if we think about the exporter and import of the firm that does both, these tend to be larger, they tend to have higher productivity, they pay higher wages and they have much higher levels in employment. So that's one interesting dimension that we've already picked up. The second key interesting result is we start looking at export performance. And one of the key objectives obviously in the South African government and I think globally is to enhance export performance. And what we're finding is that exporters, manufacturing exporters, the success of exporting, the success of exporting increased value, the success in exporting new products and the success of exporting to new destinations is actually very closely associated with the ability to access foreign inputs. So there's complementarity between access to imported inputs and the kind of products and the growth in exports of the South African manufacturing firms. So that's another interesting insight we've been picking out. What we haven't seen yet is the, and we haven't yet studied, is the relationship to employment. And my hunch there is that it's not as positive as we'd like. I think exporters tend to be skilled, relatively skilled. I think the way manufacturing firms are orientating into the global environment is they're moving up the skill scale that's been complemented through the access and the quality of the inputs. I think the technology embodied in the intermediate inputs that the firms are importing complement skilled labor rather than unskilled, that's a hunch. But that poses, it suggests, that the growth in the exports within South Africa and encouraging export growth is not necessarily going to deal with the key unemployment constraint that we face, in particular that of the unskilled work within South Africa. I think UNU Ida's brought a strong force and influence in this particular project. I mean, given it's an international institution that's well respected, what they seem to be very successful in doing is unlocking this data. And I think purely by opening up access to this data, they're going to initiate a lot of academic research and new research. I think that's a very positive contribution from UNU Ida. A second key contribution within this frame is the UNU Ida's obviously got lots of contacts with excellent academics across the globe. So what we've seen in this project is some very strong foreign academics with strong international skills have been brought in and they're playing a strong role in leadership within the assembly of the data and the preparation of the data for our own analytical purposes. So that's I think another very important contribution. I think as we go down once we produce the reports and the papers, obviously the dissemination network will be very important. But I think for us another important avenue and an element is the access into the policy arena. And my view is if you have international organizations that are able to come in and bring in an independent external assessment of the research, both the research they've conducted as well as the research that has been conducted by local academics, it makes the work more tangible, more credible and is therefore able to influence the policy arena much more strongly than if it was just emerged through a domestic source. So I think this complementarity between foreign institutions, foreign academics and domestic researchers, I think brings together a good combination will produce good research that hopefully will have an influence on policy as well.