High and growing rates of unemployment have been a source of great frustration to policy-makers. Although exports have been buoyant and the 1990s has been the first decade of sustained growth, unemployment has been rising by 2 percentage points each year. If the expanded definition is used, the rate of unemployment reached 41.8%…"

This paper looks at social mobility in the context of a growing economy. The nature and extent of Black affluence in South Africa provides an indicator of the impact of efforts to eradicate the remnants of apartheid-era racial discrimination in the South African education system and labour market. Most studies examining social mobility…"

Policy makers in the public sector are often faced with requests for financial and other support of investment projects and incentive schemes. Frequently, such requests are accompanied by or require economic impact analyses of some sort. Economic impact assessment of investment projects can be undertaken at various levels. At one level, decision makers…"

This paper investigates the economic impact of globalisation on the Namibian labour market. It deals with how trade liberalisation, which is just one dimension of globalisation, impacts on the labour market, and therefore outlines possible indicators of the links between liberalisation and employment. The paper argues that the economic returns from greater openness…"

This paper outlines the major emigration trends over the last twenty years. It argues that the two major causes of emigration have been real wage differentials and falling immigration restrictions in the major destination countries. The paper concludes by outlining some policy interventions that can be instituted to decrease emigration."

This paper contributes to the debate over the effect of trade on the demand for labour in the manufacturing sector in South Africa. Previous work in the area has decomposed employment to find the likely contribution of trade effects, has investigated the correlation between employment and trade, and has used fixed effects panel…"

This paper uses two firm level surveys, the National Enterprise (NE) survey and the World Bank and Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council (GJMC) co-ordinated survey, to explore the implications of globalisation on employment in South Africa. We use the firm surveys to analyse the impact of trade liberalisation on the level and skill structure…"

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Studies on the South African labour market have almost exclusively focused on the factors determining and shaping the current and future supply of labour in the country. This has, in the main, been driven by the availability of national data sets that have been limited essentially to household surveys produced by Statistics South…"

This study is published by the World Bank in its informal series of Discussion Papers on the South African Economy. It draws on research supported by discussions and interaction with staff from a wide range of South African institutions. Since 1994, South Africa has made undeniable progress across a number of critical areas.…"

The South African government's objectives of job creation and poverty reduction depend on the success of policies that promote the employment of unskilled labour. Over the past decade, unskilled jobs in the formal sector have been lost, while the demand for skilled capital and labour has risen. In sectors that heavily employ less-educated…"

From the standpoint of labor around the world the problem with globalization is not that it lowers market-determined wages and reduces employment - it is as likely to do the opposite, and which it does will vary from country to country. The more general problem is that labor depend on effective democratic states…"

A narrow unemployment rate of 21.2% and a broad unemployment rate of 36% in 1997 in South Africa indicate a substantial number of working age people who did not work in the last seven days but would accept a job even though they were not actively searching for work. Under the narrow or…"

South Africa’s recent integration into the world economy provokes the question about its potential for building competitive advantage and prosperity at the local level in the context of an increasingly globalised economy. The experience of prospering localities in industrialised countries, in particular Western Europe and Japan, suggests that the small and medium-sized enterprise…"

The paper utilises data from a survey of plastics firms and six firm case studies to examine the relationships between production and technology changes, and employment. The analysis examines associations between different factors influencing firms in making such changes and firm performance. These factors include trade liberalisation and the export performance of firms.…"

The growth of employment in the manufacturing sector has been an important issue in development economics for a long time. Employment growth is, of course, limited by output growth in this sector, but the elasticity of employment with respect to output has varied widely in different regions and economies. This paper focuses attention…"

This paper develops a theoretical macro-economic model that links social infrastructure investment, taxation, and wages to income determination and job creation. The framework incorporates productivity effects, a fiscal budget constraint, and the public good nature of social infrastructure investment and wages, identifying a multiple equilibrium problem with the possibility of a low social…"

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This paper examines the gender dimensions of the growth in informal and flexible work in South Africa and the government's policy response to this. The paper outlines the growth in informal and flexible work practices, and as illustrative examples, analyses how trade and industrial policies and labour market policies are impacting on the…"

Six years into South Africa's fledgling democracy one is prompted to ask: what has been achieved, if anything? In this paper, I will attempt to provide some answers, if tentative, concerning economic mobility as it pertains to labour markets in KwaZulu-Natal using the KwaZulu Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) data. To do so I…"