Guidelines for registration for higher degrees in Economics

All applications to register for a Masters or Doctorate in Economics must be done through the administrative department at Unisa concerned: The Directorate of Student Admissions and Registrations: Senior Qualifications. Applications are not processed by the Economics Department.

The MPEMS92 or DPEMS02 Research Proposal Module (RPM) for Economics must be completed before you can proceed to the dissertion/thesis stage of your Masters/Doctorate. The required outcome for the module is the submission of an acceptable research proposal. The following should be noted:

1. Choosing a topic and title

The first thing you must do in this module is to decide upon an acceptable topic and title, after which a provisional supervisor will be allocated to help you with your research proposal. In this regard, please note the following:

• Only a member of staff with a Doctorate may supervise a Doctorate.
• Supervision capacity in the Department of Economics is limited and we cannot guarantee supervision of the specific topic you may want to study.
• If there have already been a number of Doctorates or Master's degrees or research proposals on a similar topic, you may be asked to resubmit a new proposal with a different title and topic outline.
• We may be unable to provide supervision for local studies within foreign countries that require detailed institutional and other background knowledge thereof.
• The Department of Economics is not well-equipped to supervise studies involving the gathering of primary data using a questionnaire survey and sampling methodology. Such studies may be better placed in Departments such as Sociology or Development Studies found in other Colleges of the university.
• If you intend using Econometrics in your study, you must show evidence of competency in this regard by giving us details such as the courses in Econometrics and/or other quantitative methods that you have taken and passed accordingly.

The title proposal should comprise a title which identifies the specific issue you wish to investigate followed by a one page outline of what you intend to do and how you intend to go about it (your research methodology). Your one page outline must refer to and briefly explain three key journal articles in the context of your study.

2. Departmental research profile

The main areas of research interest and expertise in the Department are as follows:

• International trade and finance
• Public sector economics
• Macroeconomics
• Monetary economics
• Microeconomics
• Development economics

3. Resources for the research proposal module

Once you have registered, the following resources will be made available to you:

• Generic College of Economic and Management Sciences TL101 which outlines the basic requirements for an acceptable research proposal.
• Welcome letter from the Department of Economics giving more specific guidelines in this regard (this document).
• Access to the library. The subject librarian for Economics currently is Ms Leanne Brown and her contact details are: Brownlt@unisa.ac.za, +27-(0)12-429-3216.

4. Role of the supervisor

Once you are registered, all further communication about your research proposal must be directed to the provisional supervisor allocated to you. The provisional supervisor will guide you through the RPM. As noted in the TL101 for the module, you have three attempts at writing up an acceptable research proposal. If you are unable to write an acceptable research proposal you will not be permitted to register for the dissertion/thesis stage of your Masters/Doctorate. Your provisional supervisor will not write your research proposal for you but will be able to help you as follows:

• Respond to any queries you may have about the format of the research proposal.
• Comment on your proposed reading, sources of data and other information.
• Suggest additional readings and sources where necessary.
• Ensure that you have correctly acknowledged and referenced your sources and warning about the penalties for plagiarism (also see sections 5 and 6 below on our guidelines for writing an acceptable research proposal).
• Comment on the proposed econometric and/or other quantitative techniques you intend using to analyze the data and other information and, if deficient in this regard, recommend ways in which you can improve these (such as enrolling for courses in Econometrics at Unisa or some other institution).
• Comment on your use of language and writing skills and, if unacceptable, suggest ways in which you can improve these (such as enrolling for a TEFL or similar language course).
• If the first or second draft is unacceptable, give you timely clear reasons why this is the case and what you should do to improve it accordingly.

Recommendations by the provisional supervisor regarding the acceptability or otherwise of your research proposal will be considered by the Higher Degrees Committee (HDC) of the Department of Economics. You will be informed whether or not your research proposal has been accepted or rejected accordingly.

5. Guidelines for writing an acceptable research proposal

Selecting an acceptable topic and title for your research proposal is not easy and you should be prepared to put a lot of thought, time and effort into this task. The main problem is to delimit satisfactorily the scope of the topic. If the topic is too broad it will be impossible to research properly. For example, a title like “Unemployment” would require you to review innumerable books and journal articles on this subject which would be an unmanageable task. However, if the topic is too narrow it may run the risk of being irrelevant or inconsequential. A title like, “An analysis of the banana market in Durban” may be original in that nobody else may have studied this specific topic but it does not promise much in terms of extending the body of knowledge and understanding in economics (see also the concern noted at the beginning of this letter regarding supervision for local or regional studies in foreign countries). Remember that a Doctoral thesis must make an original and substantive contribution to knowledge in the discipline.

A research proposal is a statement of intent. It comprises a title followed by a table of contents with a chapter by chapter outline of what you intend to study and how you intend to do it. The chapters should be organized according to an introduction, body and conclusion. Each chapter has its own title. The introduction explains in more detail the specific hypothesis or problem statement you want to study and the methodology or how you intend to do this. The chapters forming the body of your proposal focus on specific aspects thereof. In the conclusion you outline what the main findings may be in relation to the hypothesis you intend investigating. Obviously you will not know what your findings will be in advance. However, your conclusion should relate to the specific hypothesis or problem area that you have explained in your introductory chapter(s). Thus the concluding chapter in your research proposal should outline what kind of evidence or other findings would either support or falsify the hypothesis accordingly.

Note that the specific hypothesis or problem area you wish to investigate must be put in the context of previous research. Before gathering and analyzing the data and other information pertinent to your specific investigation, you must review the key research published in this area (including books but most importantly relevant articles published in subject specific academic journals). As a rough guide, about two-thirds of your thesis should be dedicated to the description, interpretation and evaluation of the relevant theoretical and empirical research published on the subject.

Also note that all sources must be acknowledged and referenced properly. Any form of plagiarism is unacceptable and submission of a research proposal which shows evidence of plagiarism will be rejected. The Department of Economics prefers the Harvard system of acknowledgement and referencing of sources. Your supervisor will be able to advise you about this.