“I always thought if I got an opportunity, I’d visit South Africa, but at that stage, I didn't know I would settle down here,” says Rangan Gupta, one of the top academic achievers at UP, who chats about his academic activities in his adoptive home.

Professor Rangan Gupta of the Department of Economics at the University of Pretoria (UP) has walked off with his second Exceptional Academic Achiever Award. He received the same award in 2019, and for eight consecutive years, he has also received the Best Researcher Award in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences.

Prof Gupta is not just held in high esteem within UP though. South Africa’s National Research Foundation has rated him a B2 researcher, which acknowledges his “considerable international recognition for the high quality and impact of his/her recent research outputs”. Internationally, he has been included in the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list for 2021 and 2022, which represents one in 1 000 of the world’s population of scientists and social scientists.

Prof Gupta’s research is both prolific and diverse. He has published over 750 articles in accredited international journals, an output noted as an average of 70 articles per year since 2017 alone. His topics range from Brexit, BRICS exchange rates, bitcoin, and geopolitical risks in terms of forecasting stock market volatility with regime-switching, to financial inclusion and gender inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.

Increasingly his research is on time series and panel data econometrics, which means data analysis over time and across countries, focusing on climate change. More specifically, he measures climate risks and their effects across developed and developing economies.

He credits his phenomenal publishing record to being naturally curious and easily bored.

“I always like asking questions. So if I read something, I think: ‘Can this be done in the South African context, or for another economy, or maybe on a different asset market?’ I tend to get bored if I'm working on only one specific paper. So I work simultaneously on multiple things.”

With this style of working, Prof Gupta finds it hard to pinpoint how many journal articles he is working on presently.

“To be honest, I don't really know,” he says. “Maybe five, maybe 10 – it depends on the co-authors, as we basically work on a whole host of research ideas.”

He said his co-authors, many in different time zones, are “equally driven, like-minded authors who also do not want to delay research”.

It also helps that he teaches only at postgraduate level. Although this spares him undergraduate classes with hundreds of students, it does involve teaching core modules and supervising students, where his tally is 19 PhD graduates.

“I’m very thankful to the department in that regard,” Prof Gupta says. “They've given me the space to do research.”

Another reason for his multifaceted and relentless research is the inspiration from his own PhD supervisor, Christian Zimmermann, now Assistant Vice-President at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis in the US.

“He was like my academic father. I sometimes wouldn't really understand what he was saying, but over the years, as I've matured, I have utilised many of the discussions I had with him for my PhD students. He used to tell me: ‘The PhD is a degree; get it out of the way, but do not stop there – start investigating.’ And he would say: ‘I'm giving you a set of tools but they are not applicable to macroeconomics only; you can use that thinking for any other area.’”

That was at the University of Connecticut in the US, from where Prof Gupta was enticed to UP. It was part of a drive by Prof Jan van Heerden, now retired, to make the department more international in representation. Invited to spend a week at UP to experience it in person and present a paper as part of the selection process, Prof Gupta laughs at what finally clinched the deal. On his last day, he was taken to a cricket match between the Dolphins and the Titans in Centurion, followed by a braai.

“I always say, it was the taste of boerewors that did it.”

Now he has spent 18 years in his adopted city of Pretoria, the same amount of time he spent growing up in the small town of Chinakuri in West Bengal in India. There, his father worked in the local coal mine from the age of 19, studying part-time as he worked his way up to management. Three years ago, at the age of 76, his father graduated with a PhD in disaster management.

Prof Gupta is very much part of an academic family; his wife is Prof Sonali Das. Although they are both from India, and both did their master’s at the University of Calcutta, they only met when doing their doctorates in Connecticut. She joined him in Pretoria a year after he arrived and is now an Associate Professor in UP’s Department of Business Management.

Prof Gupta is a big proponent of living a balanced life. It is why he is almost envious of the South African education ecosystem that his two children, a daughter aged 16 and a son of 11, have access to, with opportunities to take part in extramural activities such as piano and sport.

“I always say you should play sport, because you learn a lot more about life when you are with your friends out there. You learn to take defeat in the same way as your victories, not to go crazy when you win.”

Prof Gupta has always had an affinity with South Africa. He followed its news “from a very young age”, he says.

“Growing up with that history, a very stark history, a very unique history, it was always intriguing to me When South Africa was readmitted into international sport, the local cricket team came to play at the Eden Gardens [stadium] in Kolkata on 10 November 1991, and I was one of 110 000 spectators in the stands that day. I always thought if I got an opportunity, I would visit South Africa, but at that stage, I didn't know I would settle down here. Life comes full circle.”