SEMINAR & WEBINAR: Thursday, 21 April 2022, 4 pm at Eden Grove Seminar Room 3 & online via Zoom (details below),
SPEAKER AND TOPIC: Dr Mbuso Moyo, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). Are Industrial Policies a Vehicle for Creating Sustainable Decent Jobs? Evidence from South Africa.
THE PAPER: South Africa is a middle-income, semi-industrialised country, but its unemployment rate far exceeds comparable economies. Unemployment breached eight million in 2019, rose another million during the pandemic; 35 percent of the workforce was jobless in 2022. Mass unemployment dates from the 1970s, and is a major driver of poverty, erosion of the social fabric, and crime. From the early 1980s, successive apartheid and post-apartheid governments sought renewed growth and employment through neo-liberal free market programmes, notably GEAR. This paper argues instead for a carefully designed and calibrated industrial policy, with state intervention in markets to directly support potential growth, shifting the economy towards a higher productivity but labour-intensive trajectory. Such policy requires a critical evaluation of the use of state monopolies such as ESKOM under apartheid, and the recent reinvigoration of industrial policy post-apartheid through state support to auto, clothing and textiles, and mineral beneficiation. A political choice must be made to replace free market models with active measures systematically creating decent jobs , and learning from the past achievements and failures of this instrument in South Africa.
SPEAKER: Dr Mbuso Moyo holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Johannesburg, on "Youth Unemployment in the Royal Bafokeng Nation, South Africa: The Interplay of Perceptions, Lived Experiences, Aspirations and Choices." His work examines how current customary law bolsters unilateral chiefly power, undermining local communities' access to and rights over land, and considers how economic policies can be better tailored to promote growth and job creation. He is currently Programme Manager for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES)-South Africa.
JOINING: register in advance for the seminar, which will use Zoom, by going to:
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HOSTS: The series is run by the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) in partnership with the Departments of Sociology & Industrial Sociology, and Economics & Economic History, Rhodes University and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES).
NALSU, based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, is engaged in policy, research and workers' education. Built around a vibrant team from disciplines including Economics, History and Sociology, it has active partnerships and relations with a range of advocacy, labour and research organisations. It draws strength from its location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and the contradictions of the post-apartheid state, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.