South Africa has achieved a lot since 1994, when ANC-led government took office. The Performance of the economy since 1994, as measured by the growth rate, has been encouraging with an average growth rate of approximately 2.8% per annum. The inflation rate has been recently under control at between 3% and 6% per annum, the inflation target set by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB). Despite this success problems of unemployment and poverty are still very much with us and have not yet begun to diminish unambiguously. Poverty is around 45% to 50% while broad unemployment rate is somewhere around 26% to 40%. This paper attempts to reexamine the debate on whether SA is experiencing jobless or job creating growth in the context of Okun’s law. Making use of the Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) technique to characterize the dynamics of employment in response to output shocks, this study concludes that while an increase in output increases total employment in general; nevertheless there are some sectors (such as primary and secondary sectors) where the impact of output shocks has been negligible.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade in its series DEGIT Conference Papers with number
c012_043.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: