The researcher principal of the Navarra Center for International Development (NCID), Luis Ravina, traveled to South Africa to expand and strengthen the center's network contacts. This country has great weight in NCID's research. On this occasion he was accompanied by one of the assistants of research of this project of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, Pierce King. 

The Full Professor of Economics Luis Ravina met with the Spanish ambassador to South Africa, Juan Sell Sanz, and the chief economic and commercial counselor, Enrique Manzanares Carbonell, from the office of Economics and Trade of the Spanish embassy in Johannesburg.

He also met François Bonnici, director of the Bertha Center for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Cape Town Business School. This center was born in 2011 as a complement to that business school, which specializes in the research and the training on topics such as innovation in education, social change and innovations in the healthcare system for those most in need.

During this same trip, Luis Ravina had a meeting with Julian May, director of high school of development Social and professor at the University of Western Cape. May is an expert on poverty issues and development in South Africa. He also met Nazeem Mustapha, who is part of the Human Sciences Research Council, an institution that carries out policy-relevant social projects for civil society organizations and international development agencies.

Prof. Ravina also met with a partner of NCID, Rangan Gupta, Professor of Economics at the University of Pretoria. He is currently working closely with NCID resident professor Luis Alberiko Gil-Alaña. The two experts jointly published two papers in late 2013: 'Does Sunspot Numbers Cause Global Temperatures? Evidence from a Frequency Domain Causality Test' and 'Persistence and Cycles in Historical Oil Prices Data'.

It should be recalled that another of the Center's researchers, Álvaro Morcillo, also collaborates with people from South Africa for his research on the role of emigrants from this country - especially those living in the United Kingdom - and their decision to return.