Two Policies to Alleviate Unemployment in South Africa

At transition in 1994, the new South African government inherited an economy that had systematically disadvantaged most of the population. For almost a half century, Blacks1 had been subject to an intentionally second-class education, labor laws that precluded their advancement, business regulations that outlawed many forms of firm ownership, and laws that kept them from living in the metropolitan areas that were the center of commerce. Unemployment was about 15 percent. A dozen years later and all of these restrictions of the Apartheid system have disappeared from the law. Over this same period, unemployment has about doubled, and the same groups that struggled under Apartheid now disproportionately bear the costs of this unemployment.