formation of South Africa's tax code. He was a believer in the "promotion of equity through taxation and in tax as an instrument of redistribution." In the 1970s he sat on John Vorster's economic advisory committee. In the 1980s Graaff was the dominant intellectual figure on the Margo commission which reformed South African tax law. He played a large role in the commission's decision to collect more money from a more efficient, indirect tax thereby leading to the adoption of a value added tax in South Africa. Graaff sat on the Katz commission from 1994 to 1998 which looked at the how the South African tax system could best help the post-Apartheid South African government's social democratic policies thereby leading to the restructuring of the South African Revenue Service as an independent body. Graaff was also the managing director of the wealth management firm Graaff's Trust and the urban development firm Milnerton Estates, a company that developed a large number of Cape Town's suburbs along the West Coast such as Parklands and Milnerton. Mountaineering Graaff was one of South Africa's most active and accomplished mountaineers, pioneering mountain climbing routes in East Africa and the Himalayas. This included being one of the first people to officially summit the Spitzkoppen mountain in Namibia. He also wrote a number of articles on mountaineering in the South African Mountaineering Journal. Death He died on 6 January 2015, aged 86, in Kenilworth, Cape Town after falling and hitting his head on Long Street, Cape Town. Major works Fluctuations in Income Concentration, 1956, South African Journal of Economics. Rothbarth's `Virtual Pricing System' and the Slutsky Equation, 1947, Review of. Economic Studies, 15, 91–95 A Note on the Relative Merit of Taxes and Subsidies, 1947, South African Journal of Economics. Towards an Austerity Theory of Value, 1948, South African Journal of Economics. On Optimum Tariff Structures, 1949, Review of. Economic Studies. Theoretical Welfare Economics, 1957, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Equity and Efficiency as Components of the General Welfare, 1977, South African Journal of Economics. References External links The History of Economic Thought – Jan de Van Graaff homepage Theoretical Welfare Economics: A Comment, M. W. Reder, 5 MAY 2007 Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Welfare economists Development economists 20th-century South African economists University of Cape Town alumni People from the Western Cape Writers from Cape Town Afrikaner people 1928 births 2015 deaths Johannes South African