South African Labour Market Transitions Since the Global Financial and Economic Crisis: Evidence from two Longitudinal Datasets

Dennis Essers

Journal of African Economies, 2017, vol. 26, issue 2, 192-222

Abstract: This paper studies individual labour market mobility and its determinants in South Africa since 2008 using two large, nationally representative longitudinal datasets: a set of 2-year panels based on the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) and quarter-to-quarter matched Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) cross-sections. We find considerable mobility in the South African labour market, with men and women transitioning in and out of employment and between different forms of employment and non-employment, both in the short and medium run. Our econometric analysis shows that at least part of this mobility is explained by demand-side factors outside of individuals’ direct control. Matric or post-matric level education and, to some extent, older age increased workers’ job security, above and beyond the influence of other, job-related variables. Higher education also helped individuals find jobs, independent of their initial labour market status and earlier work experience. On the whole, our findings suggests that in South Africa labour market segmentation manifests itself through selective rather than indiscriminate rigidities: higher-educated and/or more experienced labour market participants more easily break through the barriers to entry into the most valued jobs and, once there, benefit more from downward rigidity in the labour market than others. We further show how, following the global financial and economic crisis, short-term labour market mobility gradually decreased and segmentation became somewhat less selective on the level of education.

Keywords: labour market mobility; labour market segmentation; global financial crisis; South Africa; NIDS; QLFS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G01 J21 J24 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejw024 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:oup:jafrec:v:26:y:2017:i:2:p:192-222.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().