An Employment-Targeted Economic Program for South Africa

Robert Pollin, Gerald Epstein, James Heintz and Léonce Ndikumana

Chapter 11 in Economic Alternatives for Growth, Employment and Poverty Reduction, 2009, pp 227-240 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This report outlines a pro-poor, employment-focused economic policy framework for South Africa. Its specific focus is the severe problem of mass unemployment in South Africa today. Unemployment was between 26.5 and 40.5 per cent as of March 2005, depending on whether one uses the ‘official’ or ‘expanded’ definition of unemployment (with the expanded definition including so-called discouraged workers). The paper’s concentration on the problem of mass unemployment is fully consistent with the stated goals of the current African National Congress (ANC) government. At the Growth and Development Summit in 2003, President Thabo Mbeki singled out ‘more jobs, better jobs, and decent work for all’ as one of the country’s four key economic challenges. Currently, the preliminary presentations of the Government’s new economic policy framework, the ‘Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (ASGISA)’, indicate that it affirms its commitment to cutting the unemployment rate by half by 2014.

Keywords: Labor Intensity; Democratic Transition; African National Congress; Employment Generation; Mass Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25063-5_12

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230250635_12

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