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Understanding and characterizing the services sector in South Africa: An overview

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  • Haroon Bhorat
  • François Steenkamp
  • Christopher Rooney
  • Nomsa Kachingwe
  • Adrienne Lees

Abstract

The South African services sector is large and growing. This coupled with declining employment shares in manufacturing and mining (i.e. deindustrialization) suggests that South Africa is a de facto service-orientated economy. Employment patterns in services reveal a segmentation that is characterized by high-productivity, high-wage services, low-productivity, low-wage services, and government services. There has been sustained growth in services exports in the post-1994 period but the composition is biased toward traditional services.

Suggested Citation

  • Haroon Bhorat & François Steenkamp & Christopher Rooney & Nomsa Kachingwe & Adrienne Lees, 2016. "Understanding and characterizing the services sector in South Africa: An overview," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2016-157, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    • Handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2016-157
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    5. Abeer Mohamed Ali Abd Elkhalek, 2019. "Economic Development and Participation of Women in Services Sector: Empirical Evidence from Egypt," International Journal of Economics and Finance, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 11(2), pages 155-164, February.
    6. Petersen, Il-haam & Kruss, Glenda, 2021. "Universities as change agents in resource-poor local settings: An empirically grounded typology of engagement models," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
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    8. Adaiah Lilenstein, 2020. "Better measures of progress: Developing reliable estimates of educational access and quality in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa," Working Papers 13/2020, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    9. Tolcha, Tassew Dufera & Bråthen, Svein & Holmgren, Johan, 2020. "Air transport demand and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa: Direction of causality," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Services; Economic development; South Africa; Economic growth; Structural change;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L80 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - General
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O55 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Africa

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