South Africa may not be able to achieve its employment target as set out in its Industrial Policy Action Plan (Ipap), due to slow growth in manufacturing.
According to David Kaplan, professor emeritus at the School of Economics, University of Cape Town, the decline in manufacturing employment arose not only because of the slow rate of manufacturing growth but because the employment intensity – the number of jobs per unit of output – is low or declining.
Despite the declared objective of Ipap to create an additional 350,000 manufacturing jobs by 2020, manufacturing employment has fallen by 32,000 jobs from its 2008 figure, with manufacturing output still below that of 2008.
In contrast, emerging markets overall have increased manufacturing output by some 50%. The jobs haemorrhaging in various key industries has prompted the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) to call for intervention to stem the rising tide of job losses.
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