Leveraging Services for Employment, Growth and Equity: Policy Scan and Gap Analysis: Government Initiatives to Promote Trade in Services
Services account for more than 70% of output and employment in the South African economy. Strategies are needed to ensure services contribute to dynamism in the economy. Stimulating trade in services is one means to enhance service industry contribution to growth. In this paper, Mayer reviews the South African policy environment for services trade and…
read more >>Liberalisation of Trade in Services in South Africa: The Multilateral Dimension
The services sector is an increasingly important dimension of South Africa’s economic development, in terms of both its contribution to growth and its export potential. While exposing the services sector to international competition has the potential to unleash significant gains, deep and justified concerns regarding unemployment, poverty alleviation and universal access to basic services have…
read more >>Which Sectors Can Be Engines of Growth and Employment in South Africa? An Analysis of Manufacturing and Services
Tregenna investigates whether manufacturing still has the potential to be the engine of growth in South Africa, or whether services can play this role in future. International comparisons reveal that while the share of manufacturing value added in South Africa is high for the country’s level of income, the share of manufacturing employment is less…
read more >>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 >>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 >>Formal-Informal Economy Linkages and Unemployment in South Africa
South Africa’s high involuntary unemployment and small informal sector are attributed to an underperforming formal sector and barriers to entry into the informal sector. Davies and Thurlow examine the economy-wide linkages between the formal and informal economies, while accounting for different types of informal activities. A multi-region, empirically calibrated computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is…
read more >>Formal-Informal Economy Linkages
The term informal sector, informal economy, ‘second economy’ and informality is often used interchangeably. Altman defines ‘informality’ to entail precariousness, in that the activity operates beyond bureaucratic rules or regulations. This is an important concept for poor working people. Focusing policy on structural solutions to reduce precariousness in household livelihoods is particularly important in a…
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