Scholars

Imraan Valodia has joined the Levy Institute as a research associate with the Gender Equality and the Economy program. He will be working on two collaborative projects: a 10-country study of gender and taxation with Caren Grown, and time-use analysis with Rania Antonopoulos and Maria Floro.

Valodia is a senior research fellow in the School of Development Studies (SDS), University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. He has worked on gender and employment and economic policy, including the women's budget initiative in South Africa, as well as on gender and taxation. He has also worked extensively on the informal economy, critically examining informal economic statistics; on conducting industry-level studies of informalization; and on linking informal employment to broader labor market trends in South Africa. He previously conducted research on behalf of the trade union movement work for the Trade Union Research Project.

Valodia is currently exploring the links between time use and gender and employment using the South African time-use data. His other research interests include trade and industrial policy in South Africa and new social movements. He has just completed an edited volume on new social movements in South Africa with colleagues at SDS (to be published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press in 2006).

Valodia is a member of Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global research-policy network that seeks to improve the status of the working poor, especially women, in the informal economy; and the International Working Group on Gender, Macroeconomics, and International Economics (GEM-IWG), where he is incorporating the informal economy in macroeconomic models.

Some of his most recent academic publications include:

• “Macro-Micro Linkages in Trade: Trade, Efficiency and Competitiveness of Manufacturing Firms in Durban, South Africa” (with M. Velia), Journal of African Economies, forthcoming;
• Globalisation, Marginalisation and New Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa (with R. Ballard and A. Habib), forthcoming;
• “Definitions, Data and the Informal Economy in South Africa: A Critical Analysis” The Development Decade? Economic Social and Change in South Africa, 1994–2004, V. Padayachee, ed., 2005;
• “Local Government Support for Women in the Informal Economy in Durban, South Africa” (with C. Skinner), International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 16(3); and
• “Economic Policy and Women's Informal and Flexible Work in South Africa,” Development and Change, 32(5).

Valodia received a B.Com. (Hon) from the University of Natal and an M.Sc. in international trade and finance from Lancaster University, England. He expects to receive his Ph.D. in economics from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, in early 2006.