Examining the state of South African labour market using three under-utilised surveys
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Date
2024
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University of the Western Cape
Abstract
The South African labour market exhibits a distinctive feature of persistently high unemployment levels and rates (especially amongst the youth cohorts) and a small size of the informal sector. Since the advent of democracy, there is an abundance of local empirical studies that analysed the October Household Survey (OHS), Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) data to examine the state of the country’s labour market. As expected, these labour surveys have been used a lot as they asked comprehensive questions on the labour market outcomes of the survey participants. However, three seriously under-utilised surveys could help examine the South African labour market from a different and seemingly broader perspective, as these surveys asked some questions that were not asked at all or not asked in great depth in the OHS, LFS and QLFS. Therefore, this study used these three seemingly overlooked survey datasets, namely the Survey of Employers and Self-Employed (SESE), Volunteer Activities Survey (VAS) and Survey of Activities of Young People (SAYP), to investigate the state of the country’s labour market from a different perspective. Firstly, using all five available SESE data waves, Chapter Two evaluated the structure, activities, environment as well as coping techniques that were applied by the youth and adult entrepreneurs in the informal sector of South Africa. The descriptive statistic results revealed that youth entrepreneurs were mainly Africans with incomplete secondary education who did not keep business account records, and conducted self-employed businesses within the wholesale and retail industry. These youth ventures were operated mainly without a fixed location or within owner’s dwellings (either with or without their own space). Moreover, the youth informal entrepreneurs cited the lack of funds to buy supplies and customers as some of their main challenges. However, in all five waves under study, the informal youth entrepreneurs declared the main areas of assistance needed were marketing, provision of alternative sites, better access to raw materials and better access to loans.
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Keywords
Labour market, Entrepreneurship, Youth employment, Volunteer activities, Child labour