 South Africa is the economic hub of the Southern Africa region. It boasts diverse industries, mining, manufacturing, agriculture, retail and wide-ranging financial, professional and communications services. And yet, with all these attractions and economic benefits, South Africa also holds the unenviable title of being the most unequal society in the world. It's a conundrum which policymakers and researchers have been grappling with. This question sits at the core of SA Tide, the Southern Africa Towards Inclusive Economic Development Programme, a unique and collaborative research and policymaking initiative. Through macro-thinking, through climate change, through labour markets, through firm behaviour, SA Tide seeks to make sure that our policy coordination or our policy matrix is including South Africans in our development process, growing economically in a way that's leveraging what this country has to offer. The SA Tide program really is about the production of rigorous and evidence-based policy work that can help policymakers inform the decisions that they have to take. The SA Tide program is a unique collaboration between academic institutions or research institutions abroad, academic and research institutions within South Africa and the government of South Africa, particularly the analytical units, the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry, SARS, and the idea is to examine in a rigorous and independent way policies and other changes that would enable South Africa to achieve its growth and development goals. SA Tide is a relatively ambitious programme focused on generating innovative research that we hope will help policymakers in taking evident-based decisions combined with a strong focus on capacity building throughout. The SA Tide program is divided into six thematic areas or work streams. In keeping with the overarching vision of SA Tide combining research with policy, each work stream is jointly led by a researcher and the relevant official within the South African government. So the collaboration almost has a win-win benefit to it in the sense that as practitioners, those who are either in tax administration or in policy making, are able to solve some of our very, very real and very practical questions and the academics and researchers that join us either locally or internationally or they get the opportunity to apply some of their scholarly approaches and to bring about real solutions to real problems. The old model where you find some clever guys to write you a report and you table a policy brief and you have a little seminar and then you leave it with the policy makers is long gone and in any event it's just like de-linked from the policy process and the real pressures of the policy community and the prioritisations as they're emerging. Since the inception of the program in 2018, it set itself some lofty goals in terms of research output and capacity building initiatives. Workstream One focuses on firm performance and how they adapt to incentives and regulation and I suppose in the context of South Africa's poor economic environment, low growth, high levels of unemployment, it looks at how certain policy interventions, whether it be some tax policy, labour market interventions, industrial policy, I suppose how firms respond to those interventions and whether those policies are actually working towards creating employment and growth. I think one of the big findings from the research relates to localisation and the fragmentation of production networks and really what we see in South Africa is it has led to a substitution of intermediate inputs produced onshore with inputs and it's not even that intermediate inputs are off-shored, in fact they're being completely substituted by inputs. So what this has really led to is an early de-industrialisation process and one of the key findings from this kind of body of research is that especially the Chinese import penetration has been found to be highly negatively associated with employment growth, with sales growth, with firm survival rates, any of the metrics that we would be interested in. But on the plus side and the positive side, investing in innovation and building capabilities can offset that negative impact of the Chinese import competition. There is significant what we call misallocation of capital in South Africa. Some parts of the research also showed this and here the policy recommendation is much more clear. We need a stronger focus on reallocating capital towards medium-sized smaller firms and away from dominating firms, for example in mining and utilities. The idea is to say that if countries are able to collect revenue and use that revenue for its own development and use that revenue in a targeted way towards inclusive growth and inclusive development, that would assist in us achieving the objectives and the aims that SA tied programme is working towards. The key to an economic growth is productivity growth and the latest South African system currently handles corporate income taxation doesn't necessarily promote productivity growth. So it gives lower effective tax burden to some of the older industries, if you wish, and not necessarily so many tax incentives for research development and the newer service sectors. So that's one. Then maybe a second one could be that the correct mix of using tax instruments versus social grants for redistribution. So I think it would be more useful to have these direct benefits rather than zero rating in the value added tax system in order to reach the distribution of objectives. When we look at macroeconomic policy, academic economists normally look at the impact upon GDP, the overall economic activity in the economy. We've done something rather different. As well as looking at those broad aggregates, we've also looked at the effect of fiscal policy and monetary policy upon equality in South Africa. Because overriding all economic issues in South Africa is the persistent and extremely high levels of inequality. The main areas of work focused around fiscal and monetary policy and in the fiscal policy space, there was a big focus around fiscal multipliers because it tells you about the relationship between government spending as well as government taxation and economic growth. And so there was quite a lot of work in this area that ultimately influenced and informed how the national treasury crafted its own macro fiscal stance. We need to think about what is going to include South Africans in our economic development. And so some of the main areas of work are just measuring our inequality in very textured ways, understanding it very deeply. And so for example, we've worked extremely hard with the tax data that this policy has made available because it gives you a lens into who benefits and who doesn't benefit from our economic growth. In my study, I look at what is the job-housing mismatch. We are people located and we are the jobs located. Releases also show that the employment search space for lower-income individuals are much smaller than those that for higher income, which means that the opportunities that lower-income individuals can access is much lower than for higher-income individuals. And that forms part of the inequality that we see individuals face on a daily basis within our country. SAE Tide has played a big role in shifting the perceptions in South Africa about what are the cost and benefits of a renewable energy future. So one of the things that we've highlighted and continue to highlight is South Africa has a very advanced water infrastructure. And that water infrastructure is extremely important in the context of climate change for more expecting, more extreme events. The outputs from especially the energy work really shows that trying to constrain the inclusion of renewable energy is not an ideal situation for South Africa and that we really do need to think a bit more about that. What we've seen in the energy plants coming out of South Africa is looking more at the inclusion of renewable energy into its power mix and we hope that they can sort of expand from there. We've also explored, I think in a rather meaningful way, the potential of Southern Africa to develop along lines that are somewhat less traditional than the existing trading relationships. I mean the sort of conventional wisdom is that South Africa exports manufactured goods and primarily benefits from that relationship to the exclusion of industrial development in other countries. We've sponsored some, I think, fairly innovative and pioneering research in terms of looking at, let's say, the relationship between urbanization and growth in the region, the relationship between agricultural exports and the ability of agricultural exporters to actually benefit from the trade relationship with South Africa and the presence of value chains. I think it's been quite an important exercise for us to try to understand the significance of regional value chains in these trading relationships. It's clear that the rich insights gained from SA Tide have already made a mark and will leave a lasting impact. I think the South Africa data sharing, all this data infrastructure has been a role model for many of the other countries on the African continent. And now we are building up data in Uganda as well, starting up similar activities also in Zambia, Tanzania, to some extent also in Rwanda. So that's a spillover effect. When the COVID pandemic started, SA Tide was very quickly able to mobilize intellectual, academic and other resources to help inform South Africa's response to the pandemic from a policy perspective. The capacity building component has been key. And in fact, I think this is the part that potentially will have the biggest impact in the long term. So specifically it involves the construction of the data lab itself. This is a physical space that stores anonymized tax data where researchers can work on it. We also engage with the Young Scholars Program which supported master's thesis. And lots of these papers went on to be published as wider working papers. And in addition, we supported PhD scholarships. So I think that these initiatives will ensure that the impact of the program lasts well beyond the Zide cycle. The anonymous tax data is a phenomenal resource. And one of the great achievements of this program has been to establish that resource as being available for researchers. The best thing from my point of view is the massive presence of South African researchers in the project as well. Coming from Denmark where we have had administrative data since the early 70s. I think Denmark is in a unique position to actually spillover knowledge to the research community in South Africa. So there is no doubt about that there has been mutual benefits from this collaboration. The biggest pride I think is the fact that we have indeed managed to reach the established goals which at the time when the program started were considered extremely ambitious, both in terms of quantity and quality. So I think that those are things that at the end will have an impact.