Reflecting on over a decade of Academic Cooperation with the University of Cape Town

3-minute read

The Academic Department of IBFD prides itself on its cooperation agreements with key institutions globally. This April, we celebrate the successful cooperation with the University of Cape Town (UCT) that has spanned for over a decade and has led to extensive collaboration.

IBFD UCT

Our agreement with the University of Cape Town, signed on 14 April 2014, has gone from strength to strength. During the past 11 years of cooperation, we have produced 9 reference works, 4 books, 23 book chapters and 20 journal articles, as a result of our partnership with UCT, all available on our Tax Research Platform.

We have also greatly enjoyed collaborating with UCT in organizing our annual teaching week, which takes place each year in the UCT campus. This teaching week provides students in Master-level programmes in the Faculties of Commerce and Law a series of lectures on International Tax. During the teaching week, a free public seminar on a topic of interest to the tax community in South Africa is also delivered. The presenters are from both IBFD and UCT. These seminars are always well attended with audiences usually close to or exceeding 100 participants. You can catch up on this year's teaching week here. 

All in all, the success of this collaboration has set an example for other cooperations that we have established and we are proud of what we have achieved with UCT. We celebrate the past decade of teaching and publications and look forward to many more years of continued cooperation.

Outside of the formal cooperation, ties have strengthened between UCT and IBFD in other ways. During the past 10 years:

  • Prof. Craig West has moved from UCT to join the IBFD Academic Department, after being the freelance managing editor of the World Tax Journal, our premier peer-reviewed academic journal on international tax for five years before joining IBFD fulltime.
  • Prof. Johann Hattingh is currently a full Professor of Law at UCT and the Chief Editor for the IBFD flagship journal, the Bulletin for International Taxation, and sits on our CSAT (Centre for Studies in African Taxation) management committee.
  • Emeritus Professor Jennifer Roeleveld sits on the boards of the World Tax Journal and the Global Tax Treaty Commentaries (for which she is also a contributing author).
  • UCT student teams participated in almost all years the GTTC Universities Competition ran (winning twice).
  • UCT Academics have become increasing engaged in IBFD conferences (including the African Tax Symposium and the Academic Tax Conference)

Here are some photos from over the years to look back on:

Second annual teaching week

The second annual IBFD teaching week in 2016 Prof. Craig West (then UCT), Prof. Jennifer Roeleveld (UCT), Prof. Pasquale Pistone (IBFD) and Prof. Johann Hattingh(UCT). 

Book launch during the IBFD-UCT Seminar in 2015

The launch of our book "BRICS and the Emergence of International Tax Coordination" during the IBFD-UCT Seminar in 2015.

Extension of the IBFD-UCT Cooperation agreement to the UCT Law Faculty in 2015

Extension of the IBFD-UCT Cooperation agreement to the UCT Law Faculty in 2015 signed by Prof. Pasquale Pistone (Academic Chairman) and Prof. Pamela Schwikkard (then UCT Dean of Law).

Find out more about our academic research and partnerships here.