Jan Hendrik Pretorius

• PhD candidate & Lecturer, Economics, Stellenbosch University
• Researcher, Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past (LEAP)
• Economist, Codera Analytics
• Consulting biostatistician

I am an innovation economist, interested in why countries invent the things they do. For my PhD I study patents, inventors and firms in 20th-century South Africa, where sanctions and apartheid's labour institutions pushed inventors towards some technologies and away from others, with lasting effects on jobs and on who profited.

My toolkit comes from economic history and applied econometrics. I build large historical datasets, often by linking records across archives, and use them to ask how the past shapes health, wealth and opportunity today.

I also lecture undergraduate microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics at Stellenbosch University. At Codera Analytics I work as an economist specialising in public finance, building and maintaining the data pipelines behind our analysis. I also consult as a biostatistician on clinical and health research.

Outside economics, I am an avid chorister. I have been singing for 20 years, most recently in the Stellenbosch University Choir, which I chaired in 2026. In a different life I would have been a musician. If I'm not in my office or at choir, you'll probably find me on the golf course.