tralac hosted a “Geek Week” at the tralac offices in Stellenbosch from Monday, November 7 to Friday, November 11, 2016 at noon, coordinated by Ron Sandrey with support from John Stuart.

tralac Geek Weeks are capacity building exercises, designed to be fully interactive, with maximum contribution from participants. Our aim is to publish the work of participants as either a tralac Working Paper or Trade Brief. 

Participants work in groups on topics of specific topics (discussed and agreed among the participants and coordinators). Each group appoints a “local team leader” to work directly with the tralac coordinator(s) on the papers. 

• South African Industrialisation. This extends previous tralac work into the concept of industrialization, and looks to where the SACU countries fit into an Asian industrialisation profile. tralac (John Stuart) has produced a couple of recent publications on this topic, and this project introduced participants to this work and extended it.

• Trade implications of Brexit. This topic will examine the trade implications for South African/SACU trade and trade policy following the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the EU (Brexit). It will concentrate on looking at South African agricultural trade with the EU and isolating the UK component of this trade to assess possible Brexit issues. Just when it looked as though the TDCA/EPA trade relationships with the EU were somewhat settled the UK has thrown a ‘curve ball’. There will be considerable uncertainty and significant trade negotiating issues ahead as the UK will no longer be a part of the EU.

• Intra-SACU Trade. This project will examine the intra-SACU trade with special focus on Botswana’s perspective. It will use trade data from the International Trade Commission (ITC) that enables re-exports to be isolated and examined for Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland (but unfortunately South Africa), and assess to the extent that these re-exports are an important component of the intra-SACU trade. Other trade and data issues will be examined to accommodate participants’ special interests.

The following individuals participated in the Geek Week:

Lucius Phaleng, Talkmore Chidede, Maria Nthebolan, Carla Tema, Andre Snyders.