Policy Pillars
Although TIPS focuses on six core policy areas, these do not work in isolation. Industrial development, for example, overlaps with sustainable growth in creating green jobs within industry. Policy implications for small development cut across industrial development and economic marginalisation. Tackling climate change issues overlaps with trade and regional integration. Rural development is central to tackling economic marginalisation. Staff members therefore work together across areas to ensure a holistic approach to specific assignments. This flexibility allows the TIPS team to develop tailored solutions for different programmes and projects.
Trade has been the key pillar of TIPS’s activities since its inception in 1996. Research involves trade negotiations as well as analysis trade performance and policymaking, with an increasing regional focus.
The African economic integration programme includes assessing how investment policies could be co-ordinated in the region, a financial market strategy at a regional level, and competition policy.
TIPS’s industrial development focus is expanding to the region, looking at issues such as how best to increase the competitiveness of local and regional industry and developing sector level strategies.
This pillar focuses on structural inequality and the associated high levels of economic marginalisation in South Africa, in particular looking at strategies to create employment in the most marginal contexts.
TIPS sustainable growth pillar focuses on issues such as the economic dimensions of climate change and low-carbon energy, and the growth of green industries as a driver for industrialisation and job creation.
A strategic area of future policy focus will be around agriculture and agro-processing with a focus on how this can advance rural development.
