Announcements

Prof. Dr. Cornelius Bothma

Cornelius Bothma is an academic with 28 years’ experience in tertiary education, and a doctor of commerce degree (DCom) in Business Management. During the past five years he was the master’s and doctoral coordinator in the Department of Marketing and Retail Management at the University of South Africa (Unisa is the largest university in Africa, with approximately 400,000 students). Before becoming an academic, he served as an export trade representative for South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry (now Department of Trade, Industry, and Commerce) for 11 years in their regional office in Cape Town and in their head office in Pretoria, and he was appointed as the trade representative for South Africa at the Embassy in Vienna and as Consul Economic in Istanbul. He has authored and co-authored over 25 academic articles, as well as authoring/co-authoring 19 books, and 23 book chapters. The most recent of these is a chapter on voice technologies and natural language processing in the context of consumer behaviour. This chapter, which is part of a Springer book on cognitive commerce, examines the neuroscience behind the human voice in business, and is to be published later this year. Professor Bothma also served as editor of The Retail and Marketing Review, and reviewed/examined numerous articles, as well as dissertations and theses for a variety of journals and universities. He completed a second master’s degree in 2024, awarded cum laude, focusing on global trade performance metrics. His research interests are international trade, as well as neurobusiness.

Erhan Artuc, Ph.D.

Senior Economist (World Bank, Development Research Group)

Erhan Artuc, Ph.D. is a Senior Economist in the World Bank's Development Research Group (Trade and International Integration Team). Prior to joining the World Bank in 2011, he was on the faculty of Koç University in Istanbul. He earned a B.A. degree from Bilkent University (Ankara) in 2001 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia in 2006.
His research primarily focuses on international trade policy and its effects on labor markets and jobs. His papers explore the distributional effects of trade liberalization, timing of trade policy, regional and sectoral mobility of workers, unemployment, informality, refugees and international migration. He has published in the Journal of International Economics, American Economic Review, The Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, and other leading academic outlets.