Director: Prof Lawrence Edwards
PRISM is located in the School of Economics. PRISM research and policy activities are focused around the following issues:
- Globalisation and industrialisation
- International trade and foreign investment
- Governance and economic policy
- Commodities and resource based industrialization
- Innovation and upgrading in developing countries
- Technology and network industries
- Industrial policy and development
- International competitiveness of firms and sectors
- Clusters and learning networks,
- China's economic impact on Africa
- Regulatory frameworks for trade, services and sectors,
- The distributional gains of industrial growth.
- The green economy
PRISM operates as a broad research network creating a community of researchers with overlapping research interests as well as resources, including data. It is intended to encourage them to share ideas, work-in-progress, and interact on common issues. An important objective is to provide a focal point for post graduate students who have an interest in these issues to find a research home. PRISM enables staff and students to interact around common themes, acts be a vehicle to publish working papers, encourage journal article publication, and team up to secure research contracts.
Whilst the intended geographical spread of work is designed to be broad, the research and policy focus aims at making PRISM a centre of excellence in Southern Africa for research and policy work on international services and manufacturing.