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The SA Daily 12 February 2019

A laboured labour market

Shireen Darmalingam

  • The Statistics South Africa’s Q4:18 Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) comes out today. Bloomberg consensus is for the unemployment rate of 27.5% in Q3:18 to have remained unchanged in Q4:18 (27.7% in Q3:17).
  • In Q3:18, the number of unemployed rose to 6.209 million, from 6.083 million in Q2. Still, the labour force increased by 219,000, to 22.589 million in Q3:18, from 22.370 million in Q2. Employment increased by 92,000, to 16.380 million in Q3:18, from 16.288 million in Q2. However, formal sector employment fell by 65,000 in Q3:18, while informal sector employment was up 189,000.
  • Unemployment has been rising since 2008, and faced with several contributing factors; a weakening SA macroeconomic environment since the 2008/9 global financial crisis, very weak households, a shift towards informal sector employment from formal, and an increasing population of the not economically active.
  • To address the labour market, President Cyril Ramaphosa said in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) last week that “government is focused in reigniting growth and creating jobs”. He further said that far-reaching measures to create jobs had been agreed on at the Jobs Summit last year with the aim of eventually doubling the number of jobs created in the SA economy each year.

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