How Much Labor Do South African Exports Contain?
Like many emerging economies, South Africa has identified exports as an engine for more inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth did not follow the substantial export growth that South Africa experienced in the 2000s. This paper...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/544181493128206993/How-much-labor-do-South-African-exports-contain http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26474 |
| Summary: | Like many emerging economies, South
Africa has identified exports as an engine for more
inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth
did not follow the substantial export growth that South
Africa experienced in the 2000s. This paper uses a newly
developed World Bank database -- the Labor Content of
Exports -- to show that the composition of South
Africa's export growth helps to understand the weak
relationship between export and employment growth. Minerals
exports, which propelled export as well as wage growth, are
not job intensive and as a result supported far less job
growth. Minerals have also increasingly become an enclave
sector with few backward linkages to the domestic economy.
In contrast, manufacturing exports support jobs and wages
primarily in input-providing sectors, where indirect
manufacturing employment is nearly 4.5 times greater than
direct manufacturing employment. The paper also documents a
shift in the labor content of global value chain–intensive
manufacturing sectors away from direct manufacturing to
indirect services. Such a shift has been biased toward
skilled labor. As a results of these trends, labor in
services sectors has been the main beneficiary of South
Africa's export growth, absorbing more than half of the
growth in wage income from exports over the 2000s, primarily
by supplying inputs to other sectors' exports. |
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