LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Business governance in Brazil and South Africa: How much convergence to the Anglo-Saxon model? Revista Brasileira de Economia Politica 21 (2): 3–23.

Lazonick W and M O’sullivan (2000) Maximizing shareholder value: a new ideology for corporate governance. Economy and Society 29 (1): 13–35.

Mohamed S (2006) Capital flows to the South African economy since the end of apartheid. Presented at the Annual Conference for Development and Change, Brazil, December 2006.

      Mohamed S (2009) Financialisation, the minerals and energy complex and South African labour. Presented at the Global Labour University Conference, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India, February 2009.

Mohamed S and K Finnoff (2005) Capital flight from South Africa: 1980–2000. In Epstein G (Ed) Capital Flight and Capital Controls in Developing Countries. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar.

Mohamed S and S Roberts (2007) Questions of growth, questions of development. New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Issues 28: 37–46.

Nolan P (2003) Industrial Policy in the early 21^st century: The challenge of the global business revolution. In Chang H-J (Ed) Rethinking Development Economics. London: Anthem Press.

      Omar R and E Webster (2003) Work restructuring in post-apartheid South Africa. Work and Occupations 30 (2): 194–213.

      Orhangazi O (2005) Financialization and capital accumulation in the non-financial corporate sector: A theoretical and empirical investigation. Working Paper 149. Amherst, MA: Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts.

Presidency, Government of South Africa (2003) Towards a Ten Year Review: Synthesis report on implementation of government programmes. Pretoria: Policy Coordination and Advisory Services, The Presidency.

      Roberts S (2005) Industrial development and industrial policy in South Africa: A ten year review. Presented at conference South African Economic Policy Under Democracy – A Ten Year Review, Stellenbosch, 28 and 29 October 2005.

Roberts S (2008) Patterns of industrial performance in South Africa in the first decade of democracy: the continued influence of minerals-based activities. In Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 65: 4–35.

Roberts S, N Chabane and J Machaka (2003) Ten Year Review: Industrial structure and competition policy. Unpublished mimeograph.

Roux A (1991) Financing economic development in South Africa. Unpublished mimeograph.

Stockhammer E (2004) Financialization and the slowdown of accumulation. Cambridge Journal of Economics 28 (5): 719–741.

Terreblanche S (2002) A History of Inequality in South Africa: 1652 – 2002. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

Tregenna F (2008) Sectoral engines of growth in South Africa: An analysis of services and manufacturing. Working Papers RP2008/98, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).

Von Holdt K (2003) Transition from below: Forging trade unionism and workplace change in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.

      CHAPTER 2

      The international economic crisis and employment in South Africa

      Neva Seidman Makgetla

      The international economic crisis had a significant impact on South Africa, with a drop in the GDP and an even larger decline in employment from the end of 2008 through the third quarter of 2009. The impact was greatest in low-income, marginalised sectors – informal, domestic and agricultural workers – and for young adults.

      Two aspects made the employment losses particularly harmful. First, South Africa has long faced unusually high joblessness by international standards. Second, the strong decline in employment in low-income sectors aggravated already deep inequalities.

      Government’s short-run response, which included a counter-cyclical fiscal policy and substantial infrastructure investment, moderated the drop in investment and growth and presumably the loss of jobs. But it did not prevent a significant fall in employment or provide support directly to the self-employed informal and domestic workers who lost their incomes. A central weakness was the failure to address international capital flows, which recovered long before the world economy and propped up emerging economy currencies like the rand. That, in turn, undermined the competitiveness of the economy as a whole, slowing the overall recovery.

      More broadly, the crisis pointed to the need to re-think traditional approaches to industrial policies, which still largely shaped South African economic policies. In particular, the space for growth on the basis of expanding exports of manufactures, always quite narrow for South Africa, seemed likely to shrink with the structural changes in the global economy associated with the crisis.

      The first section of this paper reviews trends in employment for the year from the end of 2008. The second section describes the context – the high levels of joblessness and inequality that persisted even when the economy was growing relatively strongly before 2008. Section three describes the government response to the crisis as well as the available indications of its impact. The final section reflects on some of the implications for longer-term development strategy.

      THE IMPACT OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS ON EMPLOYMENT

      The global economic crisis led to a sharper fall in South Africa’s employment than in the GDP. Moreover, the pattern of employment losses tended to deepen inequalities, with a particularly severe impact on marginalised and lower level workers and consequently on Africans and youth.

      The international downturn affected South Africa directly through the constraints on the export sectors – mostly the mining value chain, the auto industry and the wood/paper sector – and the higher cost of international credit. As the following chart shows, after a decline of around 3 per cent in the GDP between the last quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, the economy grew by 1 per cent in the second half of 2009.¹

Table 1: Quarterly GDP growth, first quarter 1994 to fourth quarter 2009

      Source: Calculated from series on quarterly seasonally adjusted annualised GDP in constant (2005) rand. Statistics South Africa. GDP in excel spreadsheets. Downloaded from www.statssa.gov.za in April 2010.

      The percentage drop in employment was significantly larger than the decline in GDP. Moreover, in the third quarter of 2009, while the GDP rose, job losses accelerated, especially in the formal sector. As table 2 shows, employment fell by around a million, or 6 per cent, between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the third quarter of 2009. Half of all job losses, and most of those in the formal sector, occurred in the third quarter of 2009.

Table 2: Employment losses in 2009

      Source: Calculated from Statistics South Africa. Quarterly Labour Force Survey for relevant quarters. Table 2. Pretoria. Downloaded from www.statssa.gov.za in April 2010.

      In the last quarter of 2009, employment increased by 89 000 or 0.7 per cent, which probably reflected the return to economic growth. The figures were not seasonally adjusted, however, and employment typically increases in December in any case; thus, the increase in employment, while welcome, probably did not herald a strong recovery.²

      Taken together, informal, agricultural and domestic

Скачать книгу