Working Paper
Employer characteristics and youth employment outcomes in the formal sector in South Africa
Through the use of administrative tax data, this study attempts to identify the characteristics of firms that employ relatively large numbers of young people. The policy objective of this exercise is to use these insights to inform policy and...
Journal Special Issue
Firm level analysis using administrative record data
This special issue focuses on a collaborative effort between the National Treasury and the South African Revenue Service (SARS) to employ administrative record data from SARS for economic policy analysis. It contains six research articles plus a...
Working Paper
Wage inequality, firm characteristics, and firm wage premia in South Africa
This paper investigates the role of firm characteristics in driving wage inequality and firm wage premia in the South African labour market. The Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (AKM) and Kline, Saggio, and Sølvsten (KSS) regression-based decomposition...
Blog
High wage inequality in South Africa – are employers to blame?
by
Shakeba Foster
January 2024
South Africa ranks as the world’s most unequal country by income. This is largely due to high wage inequality, given that wages are the main income...
Research Brief
Finding optimal solutions for efficient youth labour policies
According to South Africa’s National Development Plan Vision 2030, serious action needs to be taken to reduce poverty and encourage economic growth. One of the main challenges involves reducing the unemployment rates in South Africa, particularly...
Working Paper
Labour demand and the distribution of wages in South African manufacturing exporters
This paper contributes to the understanding of the linkages between exporting, labour demand, and wages in South Africa. We disentangle labour market differences between exporters and non-exporters and find that exporters employ more people and pay...
Working Paper
Firm-level determinants of earnings in the formal sector of the South African labour market
Labour market analysis in the South African context provides a relatively robust understanding of the individual characteristics that influence wage differentials across workers (i.e. supply-side characteristics), but provides relatively little...