The potential of social grants expenditure to promote local economic development and job creation
South Africa’s publicly funded social safety net, which consists of multiple conditional cash grants, has expanded considerably since a child support grant was added to the old age pensions and disability grants in 2002. Jacobs et al draw together local and global evidence on the developmental potential of social grants, including a typology of social…
read more >>Costing Centre Based Early Childhood Development Programmes for Children Under Age Five. Case Studies from the Western Cape
This paper is one of a series developed to inform the Scaling Up ECD Services (0–4 years) Research Project with the aim of improving child development and significant job creation. Carter et al capture information about the cost of providing ECD for children under the age of five through different forms of centre-based provision. It…
read more >>Cloud computing in South Africa: Prospects and Challenges
Cloud computing is scalable, on-demand provision of remote computing and data storage. Its dramatic growth is captured in a 2011 study that predicted that by 2014, over 60% of the world’s server workloads would take place on virtualised cloud servers, up from 8% five years earlier. This growth stems from the cloud’s advantages of scale…
read more >>Managing HIV Risk in the Workplace: Learning from SMEs
“The effective management of HIV/AIDS in the workplace is critical to reducing the negative consequences of the epidemic for the economy. This study, which is part of the Human Sciences Research Council’s research programme on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the labour market, provides six case studies on the impact and management of HIV/AIDS in the…
read more >>Resource-Based Technology Innovation in South Africa
In support of South Africa’s national R&D strategy of 2003, the Human Sciences Research Council and Mintek’s work programme on the resource-based technology clusters aims to identify policy measures to promote industrial diversification and indirect employment growth, based on the opportunities created by these sectors. It specifically considers how South Africa might promote beneficiation and…
read more >>Leveraging Services for Employment, Growth and Equity: Trade in Services: The Global Context
Mayer provides a broad overview of global trends in trade in services. The survey of the magnitude and patterns of trade in services, together with an analysis of the drivers of such trade, provides a context for assessing South Africa’s current performance and future prospects in this area. In contrast to goods, the vast majority…
read more >>Leveraging Services for Employment, Growth and Equity: An Analysis of South Africa’s Trade in Services Data
Accurate data on trade in services is necessary to inform industrial policy in the services sectors and to shape negotiating strategy at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Due to the inherent difficulty of measuring trade in services, however, there had until recently been little effort to provide a coherent conceptual framework for such trade activities….
read more >>Employment Creation through Preferential Procurement and Enterprise Development
Initiated in 2008, the Human Sciences Research Council’s Employment through Procurement Project developed a knowledge base of procurement and enterprise development strategies to achieve socio-economic objectives, with an emphasis on employment creation. It focused on whether programmes contributed to: The creation of enterprises that supply previously imported goods and services – Increased competitiveness of existing…
read more >>Strategies to Support South African Smallholders as a Contribution to Government’s Second Economy Strategy (2 Volumes)
This is Volume 1 of the study ‘Strategies to Support South African Smallholders as a Contribution to Government’s Second Economy Strategy’. In this study, Aliber et al. assess the key elements of an implementable programme to support the smallholder sector in South Africa. The study identifies successful smallholders in different settings, and examines the factors…
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