Unemployment in South Africa: The nature of the beast

Geeta Kingdon and John Knight

No 2001-15, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Unemployment in South Africa is so widespread that it demands an explanation. This paper examines two questions about South African unemployment. Firstly, why do the unemployed not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries? Secondly, why do the unemployed not enter wage employment more readily? The findings provide little support for the idea that unemployed people choose to be unemployed: the unemployed are substantially worse off, and less satisfied with their quality of life, than they would be if informally employed. Various impediments to entry into the informal sector increase open unemployment. The test of the hypothesis that the unemployed have unrealistically high wage aspirations suggests that the commonly reported high reservation wages (relative to predicted wages) are not to be interpreted as reflecting unwillingness to work.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ee70d149-ea8c-4a9e-9c47-855c1c4a0a13 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Unemployment in South Africa: The Nature of the Beast (2004)
Working Paper: Unemployment in South Africa: the nature of the beast (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2001-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().