Prof Philippe Burger
Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic
Prof Philippe Burger is currently serving as acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic at the University of the Free State (UFS).
He was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the UFS on 1 March 2022. From 1 July 2019 to 28 February 2022, he was Vice-Dean (Strategic Projects) of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, and from 1 July 2019 to June 2022 he was Pro-Vice-Chancellor: Poverty, Inequality and Economic Development of the UFS. From 1 February 2018 to 31 January 2019, he was acting Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, and from 2002 to 2019, he was Head of the Department of Economics at the UFS. He has been Professor of Economics at the UFS since 2007.
In addition, he was a 2016/17 Fulbright Exchange Scholar in the Centre for Sustainable Development, Earth Institute, at Columbia University, with Prof Jeffrey Sachs as his Fulbright host, where he wrote a book titled, Getting it right: a new economy for South Africa. The book was launched through, among others, presentations at the IMF, World Bank, and RAND Corporation in Washington DC. Published in September 2018, it deals with South Africa’s low growth and high unemployment problem.
Since April 2022, he has been a non-resident Senior Research Fellow in the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), in which capacity he is the lead of the Macro-Fiscal workstream for the SA-TIED II project.
He was a member of the Fiscal Policy and Financial Markets Task Team of the Lancet Commission on COVID-19. Co-chaired by the Head of the IMF’s Department of Fiscal Affairs and a former Minister of Finance of Chile, the task team of 11 members comprises economists from across the world, including two Nobel prize winners. The task team’s findings were fed into the Lancet Commission on COVID-19’s overall report.
From September 2012 to October 2014, Prof Burger was President of the Economic Society of South Africa.
His publications include three more books and numerous academic articles on fiscal rules and fiscal sustainability, public private partnerships, and macroeconomic and economic development policy. Together with IMF staff, he also co-authored two IMF working papers.
In 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) invited him to spend a month at the IMF as a visiting scholar in the Fiscal Affairs Department (FAD), researching public-private partnerships and the Global Financial Crisis.
For two months each in 2007, 2010, and 2012, he was seconded to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris to work on public-private partnerships and capital budgeting, while in October 2011 he joined an OECD mission to Indonesia to conduct a regulatory review of Indonesia.
He was a member of the Panel of Experts of the South African National Treasury, in which capacity he co-authored a 20-year review of South African fiscal policy since 1994.
From 2013 to 2018, he was also a member of the South African Statistics Council, which oversees the work of Statistics South Africa.
Contact:
Office Manager: Joy Maasdorp
+27 51 401 7151
maasdorpjh@ufs.ac.za