[13] In 2013/4 he was invited to be a Non-resident Senior Fellow [14] at Brookings affiliated to the Global Economy and Development programme, and working on the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI).

[15] Bhorat consults for a number of supranational organisations such as the World Bank, the UNDP, and the ILO, Ratings Agencies and emerging market fund managers.

[20] He is a member on the Advisory Committee of the joint United Nations and World Bank Policy Study on the role of Development in the Prevention of Violent Conflict.

[22] Haroon previously served as a member of the UN Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP),[23] and was Head of Research for the UN's High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

[26] Bhorat's work has three key discernable strands: Firstly there is a long-standing focus on the empirics of household poverty and inequality dynamics in South Africa.

His research feeds into policy decisions and pronouncements at the highest level, including Cabinet memoranda, State of the Nation Address (South Africa) and legislative promulgation.

This research has elicited a significant debate and discussion within the academic and policy community and the ongoing body of work is viewed as a novel intellectual contribution to the South African, and arguably developing country, literature.

Some of his earliest research involved a series of studies conducted with Murray Leibbrandt and Prof Ingrid Woolard, that used covariates such as race, gender, education and location as a good predictor of vulnerability in the South African labour market.

[32][33] Bhorat has also conducted research on Sub-Saharan Africa economies' labour markets, where he finds a largely unenforced minimum wage laws riddled with complexity and vagueness.

His work has ranged from estimated the gender pay gap in South Africa, to a more careful econometric assessment of the contribution of union membership to wages across the distribution.

Bhorat was also a key player in the first example of inter-disciplinary academic analysis focused on the emerging Shadow State and institutionalised corruption in South Africa, purposefully targeted at a non-academic audience.

They focused on the central role that State-owned enterprises (SOEs) have played given their prominence in the SA economy and their location at the interface between the State and the private sector.