Haroon Bhorat

Haroon Bhorat is Professor of Economics and Director of the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) at the University of Cape Town. His area of research has concentrated on labour economics and poverty/income distribution mainly in his native South Africa, and recently, been expanded to other parts of Africa.

Bhorat was born in Roodepoort, a mining town in Gauteng province, South Africa. He attended school at Diocesan College (Bishops) in Cape Town before achieving a BA (Honours) in Economics from University of Cape Town in 1991. He completed the coursework component of a Master of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, then proceeded to obtain a master's degree and Ph.D., in Economics from Stellenbosch University in 1996 and 2003 respectively.

Haroon Bhorat is Professor of Economics, and the Director of the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU), a university-recognized research unit located within the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He holds an National Research Foundation (South Africa) B2 rating, and with a total citation estimate of over 7700 and an h-index of 47 (as at October 2021), he is one of the most cited South African economists globally.

He is active on Twitter and features regularly on the DPRU's Facebook and YouTube accounts.

Bhorat is a member of the South African Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC), announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in the 2019 State of the Nation Address (South Africa), to ensure greater coherence and consistency in the implementation of economic policy and ensure that government and society in general is better equipped to respond to changing economic circumstances. Bhorat also advised previous Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe on economic matters, formally serving on the Presidential Economic Advisory Panel. Bhorat was the Minister of Labour's appointee on the Employment Conditions Commission (ECC) – the country's minimum wage setting body. He is a member of the Statistics Council of South Africa. He has served as advisor to the South African National Treasury, and former South African Minister of Finance, Pravin Gordhan. He has undertaken extensive work for several South African government departments – most notably the Department of Employment and Labour and the Presidency, including an appointment as Advisor on the South African Parliament's High Level Panel on Acceleration of Change and Transformation.

He joined the IZA as Research Fellow in January 2013 and is a regular IZA World of Labor contributor. In 2013/4 he was invited to be a Non-resident Senior Fellow at Brookings affiliated to the Global Economy and Development programme, and working on the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI). Bhorat was inducted to the UCT College of Fellows in 2021.

Bhorat consults for a number of supranational organisations such as the World Bank, the UNDP, and the ILO, Ratings Agencies and emerging market fund managers. He is an Advisory Board Member for the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Executive Committee Member for the International Economic Association (IEA), a member of the ILO's Global Research Reference Group (RRG), a member of Board of Directors for Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP). He sat on the advisory board of the UNDP's 2019 and 2020 Human Development Reports, and was a member of the World Bank's advisory board of the Commission on Global Poverty, as well as a member of the Program Committee of the 2017 International Economic Association (IEA) World Congress.

He is a member on the Advisory Committee of the joint United Nations and World Bank Policy Study on the role of Development in the Prevention of Violent Conflict. He also sits on the UN/WHO's High Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth. Haroon previously served as a member of the UN Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP), and was Head of Research for the UN's High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.