OECD report on South Africa released

The OECD’s first Economic Assessment of South Africa has been released on Tuesday 15 July and it looks at the reforms needed to create jobs, tackle poverty and allow growth to catch up with the most dynamic emerging economies.

Unfortunately UJ is not subscribed to the OECD databases, however A Policy Brief with the main conclusions of the survey is freely accessible in pdf format (in English and French) on the OECD’s web.

Here are some of the highlights of the Economic Assessment of SA:

Chapter 1: Achieving Accelerated and Shared Growth for South Africa
This Chapter presents an assessment of South Africa’s development strategy, the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (AsgiSA).

Chapter 2: Reforming goods and services markets in South Africa
This chapter examines the potential role of competition policy in enhancing long-term productivity growth in South Africa. It also investigates the role of regulatory and institutional reform in reducing barriers to entry, exit and growth. More precisely, it uses the OECD's methodology to calculate an indicator of Product Market Regulation (PMR) to assess the degree to which government regulation in markets for goods and services promotes or inhibits competition.

Chapter 3: Realising South Africa's employment potential
Unemployment in South Africa is extremely high and very unevenly distributed, being concentrated among young less-skilled blacks. The sharp increase in unemployment in the 1990s was driven by a surge in the supply of less-skilled labour, accompanied by a failure of labour demand to keep pace. Growth of the working-age population and the release of pent-up pressures for labour force participation in the majority black population explain the big increase in the supply of less-skilled labour, while negative demand shocks in labour-intensive sectors were an important factor in the slow growth of demand. The combination of these factors means that market-clearing would have required a substantial fall in real wages in the decade after 1994, especially for less-skilled workers.

Earlier in the year the OECD has also released their African Economic Outlook 2008 report which focuses on Technical Skills Development. It also presents a comprehensive analysis of the economic, social and political developments on the continent.