Alan Hirsch
Director, Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice, University of Cape Town
Alan Hirsch has been director of the Graduate School of Development Policy and Practice at UCT since 2013. After economic research and teaching at the University of Cape Town, he joined the South African Department of Trade and Industry in 1995, managing industry and technology policy. He moved to the Presidency in 2002. He managed economic policy in the South African Presidency, represented the Presidency at the G20, and was co-chair of the G20 Development Working Group.
He was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School, was a regular visiting professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Maastricht University and a member of the OECD secretary-general’s Inclusive Growth Advisory Group. He writes about economic development issues, including Season of Hope - Economic Reform under Mandela and Mbeki and recently co-edited The Oxford Companion to South African Economics.