Andrew Donaldson is a senior research associate of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He is a consultant to the Association for Savings and Investment of SA, advising on social security, health financing, infrastructure investment and macroeconomic policy.
He studied at the University of Stellenbosch and has master’s degrees in economics from UNISA and Cambridge University. He taught economics at the former University of Transkei, Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand, and has published in the fields of demography, economics of education, social policy, macroeconomics and public finance. In the 1980s and early 1990s he worked on rural land issues in the Eastern Cape, and on the systems and planning work of the National Education Policy Investigation.
From 2001 to 2017, Andrew served as a Deputy Director-General in the National Treasury responsible for the Budget Office and subsequently the Public Finance division, and as the inaugural head of the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC). He contributed to the work of the Katz Commission on tax policy, served on the Committee of Inquiry into a National Health Insurance System, and was a member of the team that drafted the 1996 macroeconomic strategy. He was responsible for the introduction of a medium-term expenditure framework in 1998 and led the subsequent reform of the budget process and restructuring of budget documentation. He is a former member of the Board of the South African National Roads Agency and a former trustee of the Government Employees’ Pension Fund. He continues to serve on the Investment Committee of the Jobs Fund.
