Andrew Donaldson is currently a senior research associate of the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town. He is a former Deputy Director-General in the National Treasury and served as the inaugural head of the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC). He currently advises the National Treasury on budget planning and public finance, and assists GTAC with the implementation of its public economics capacity building programme. He serves on the Investment Committee of the Jobs Fund. 

Andrew studied at the University of Stellenbosch and has masters degrees in economics from UNISA and Cambridge University. He taught economics at the former University of Transkei, Rhodes University and the University of the Witwatersrand, and has published in the fields of demography, economics of education, social policy, macroeconomics and public finance. In the 1980s and early 1990s he worked on rural land issues in the Eastern Cape, and on the systems and planning work of the National Education Policy Investigation. 

Andrew joined the former Department of Finance in 1993 as Deputy Director in the Unit for Fiscal Analysis. In 2001 he was appointed Deputy Director-General and head of the Budget Office, and subsequently served as head of the Public Finance Division, responsible for expenditure planning and policy advice. 

He contributed to the work of the Katz Commission on tax policy, served on the Committee of Inquiry into a National Health Insurance System, and was a member of the team that drafted the 1996 macroeconomic strategy. He was responsible for the introduction of a medium-term expenditure framework in 1998 and led the subsequent reform of the budget process and restructuring of budget documentation. Recent responsibilities have included the Treasury's work on social security and retirement reform, creation of the Jobs Fund and establishment of the Government Technical Advisory Centre. 

Andrew formerly served on the Board of Directors of the South African National Roads Agency and the Board of Trustees of the Government Employees' Pension Fund.