What this is, what it isn't, and how we work.
SA Policy Space tracks policy ideas that emerge from South African parliamentary committee proceedings. The Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) documents thousands of committee meetings — a rich but unwieldy record of what government is actually discussing. This project reads that record and asks: which ideas keep coming up? Which ones are feasible? Which are stalled, and why?
The goal is to surface the best ideas for removing South Africa's binding growth constraints — and to hold the system accountable when good ideas go nowhere.
SA Policy Space is built and maintained by Laurence Wilse-Samson — an economist based in New York, with a PhD in Economics from Columbia. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Competition, Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg since 2017, working on South African industrial and competition policy, and is the author of The South African Economy: A Contemporary Analysis, a companion textbook that the site's analytical framing draws on. Code, data, and evaluation harnesses are open source on GitHub.
SA Policy Space is a personal research project. Views expressed here are the author's own and do not represent the positions of any employer, university, or affiliated institution. No affiliated organisation has reviewed or endorsed the site's content.
Download Full Report: SA Growth Agenda Integrated Framework
Synthesis of all five reform packages with dependency analysis, theory of change, and sequencing priorities. Word document (.docx)
AI-assisted text — constraint syntheses and generated briefs — carries a visible provenance byline showing whether it has been reviewed by a human editor, and invited experts can append named commentary to contest or extend a synthesis.
We organise ideas around structural binding constraints on South African growth, drawing on the World Bank, NPC, and academic literature (Hausmann, Rodrik, Velasco diagnostic framework). These are: energy, logistics, skills, regulation, crime, labour market, land, digital infrastructure, government capacity, and corruption.
Committee meeting data sourced from the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) API. PMG is an independent organisation that monitors South African Parliament. They are the authoritative source for committee proceedings — visit their site for full minutes, documents, and historical records.
The research corpus draws metadata and abstracts from ERSA, the UCT Development Policy Research Unit, TIPS, Econ3x3, the Institute for Security Studies, SA-TIED, CDE, SAIIA, and the World Bank. Each paper links back to its publisher as the authoritative source; we do not host full text.
See the Who Built This section above for the maintainer's background.
SA Policy Space exposes a public JSON API for researchers and developers. No authentication required.
View API DocumentationFor individual policy ideas, use the citation widget on each idea detail page. For the underlying textbook, cite: Wilse-Samson, L. (2026). The South African Economy: A Contemporary Analysis. Available at GitBook.