Murray Leibbrandt

Murray holds the National Research Foundation Chair in Poverty and Inequality Research in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town. He is the Director of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit and the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research within the African Research Universities Alliance. He is on the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association, co-chairs the Scientific Panel on Population, Poverty and Inequality of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, and is a Senior Research Fellow of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research. He has published widely in development economics using survey data and especially panel data to analyse South Africa’s poverty, inequality and labour market dynamics. In 1995–96 he served on President Nelson Mandela’s Labour Market Commission to advise on post-apartheid labour market legislation and, from 2016–17, served on then Deputy-President Ramaphosa’s Advisory Panel on the National Minimum Wage. From 2007–2019 he was a Principal Investigator on the National Income Dynamics Study, South Africa’s national longitudinal study.