Manoel Bittencourt

Manoel Bittencourt, a native of Porto Alegre, Brazil, studied economics at PUC, Warwick and Bristol. After serving on the faculties of the universities of Cape Town, Pretoria and the Witwatersrand he moved back to Pretoria, where he is currently Extraordinary Professor of Economics. Bittencourt has studied many aspects of development macroeconomics and political economy, including the roles of inflation and finance on inequality and growth, the role of political-regime characteristics on government size, macroeconomic performance and public goods provision, and also the determinants of the democratic and fertility transitions. He has been a visiting scholar at Goettingen, IZA, Stellenbosch, Heidelberg and Oxford, and has been awarded numerous research and teaching awards from various organizations. His papers have appeared in journals such as Journal of Banking and Finance, Economic Modelling, Economic Systems, Economics of Governance, Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, Journal of Policy Modeling, and in the Oxford Handbook of the South African Economy. He has also published articles in the Conversation Africa, the World Financial Review, VOX.LACEA and in the CES-Ifo Forum.