South African Mining Sector Employment: Forecast To 2025
Baartjes focuses on trends in mining employment in South Africa, per sector, and includes a long-term forecast. He provides a profile of employment in the sector from 1995 to 2010, and discusses input shocks (e.g. electricity supply) and the commodity boom. He then reviews the primary mining sectors – gold, platinum group metals, coal, diamonds, iron…
read more >>Accounting for Changes in Manufacturing employment in South Africa
Tregenna assesses the components and possible causal determinants of changes in manufacturing employment in South Africa. She focuses on the relationships between capital stock, capacity utilisation, relative factor utilisation, and employment. Basic decomposition techniques are used to investigate the extent to which these factors account for changes in employment between 1970 and 2004. Although this…
read more >>Manufacturing Exports and Employment Growth
Davies considers the role of manufacturing exports in creating employment. It looks at the potential and limitations of the sector itself, and also its interaction with other sectors. He assesses where export growth might occur, and the contribution of different sectors to such growth, given their labour intensity, backward and forward linkages, and export dependence….
read more >>Promotion of Secondary Industrial Development & Clustering in Mpumalanga: stainless steel and chemicals clusters
“Altman et al. assess the potential for the development of a stainless steel cluster in the Middleburg/ Witbank area and a general petrochemicals cluster in Secunda. They identify concrete opportunities that would provide a platform for the development of small and medium enterprises that will generate employment opportunities. They reveal opportunities for cluster development in…
read more >>Manufacturing Employment and Import Dependence
Prof Rob Davies assesses the potential of promoting South Africa’s manufacturing sector through reduced import dependence. He explores two versions of the argument. The first suggests that it would be beneficial to reduce the imported component of inputs into manufacturing production. Imported inputs into manufacturing rose from 13.0% of gross output in 1993 to 15.9%…
read more >>Informal Employment In South Africa
Employment policy in South Africa has paid limited attention to the informal economy. From the early 1990s, the informal economy grew substantially, and yet still accounts for a small proportion of employment relative to other developing countries. The co-existence of high unemployment and a small informal economy is poorly understood in SA. Valodia explores the…
read more >>Formal/Informal Linkages in South Africa: Some Considerations
To know how the economy might meet the target of halving unemployment by 2014, the Employment Scenarios project investigated how the informal sector might grow. How much of the employment target is likely to be reached through growth in the informal economy? Is the informal sector likely to continue growing in the period leading up…
read more >>Formal-Informal economy linkages: Some conceptual and empirical issues
This report contributes to a larger project on the competitive behaviour of informal firms in a growing economy. Valodia et al explore the idea of a ‘second economy’. Notwithstanding the conceptual problems associated with the idea of a second economy, its prominence in public policy debates offers a unique space to enhance the linkages between…
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…
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