IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ctw/wpaper/201803.html

Understanding and Characterizing the Services Sector in South Africa: An Overview

Author

Listed:
  • Haroon Bhorat
  • Francois Steenkamp
  • Christopher Rooney
  • Nomsa Kachingwe
  • Adrienne Lees

    (University of Cape Town
    Director)

Abstract

The South African services sector is large and growing. This coupled with declining employment shares in manufacturing and mining (i.e. deindustrialisation) suggests that South Africa is a de facto service-orientated economy. Employment patterns in services reveal a segmentation that is characterised by high-productivity, high-wage services, low-productivity, low-wage services, and government services. There has been sustained growth in services exports in the post-1994 period but the composition is biased toward traditional services. Increased entry into developing country markets is characterised by increasingly sophisticated services. A key driver of export growth is the expansion of FDI into developed country markets, and increasingly, into developing country markets, particularly African markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Haroon Bhorat & Francois Steenkamp & Christopher Rooney & Nomsa Kachingwe & Adrienne Lees, 2018. "Understanding and Characterizing the Services Sector in South Africa: An Overview," Working Papers 201803, University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit.
    • Handle: RePEc:ctw:wpaper:201803
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://commerce.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/content_migration/commerce_uct_ac_za/1093/files/DPRU%2520WP201803.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2018
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Njoya, Eric Tchouamou & Nikitas, Alexandros, 2020. "The role of air transport in employment creation and inclusive growth in the Global South: The case of South Africa," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    2. Haroon Bhorat & Kezia Lilenstein & Morné Oosthuizen & Amy Thornton, 2020. "Structural transformation, inequality, and inclusive growth in South Africa," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2020-50, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    3. Melia, Elvis, 2020. "African jobs in the digital era: Export options with a focus on online labour," IDOS Discussion Papers 3/2020, German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
    4. Abeer Mohamed Ali Abd Elkhalek, 2019. "Economic Development and Participation of Women in Services Sector: Empirical Evidence from Egypt," International Journal of Economics and Finance, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 11(2), pages 155-164, February.
    5. Petersen, Il-haam & Kruss, Glenda, 2021. "Universities as change agents in resource-poor local settings: An empirically grounded typology of engagement models," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    6. Ivan Turok & Justin Visagie, 2020. "Building malls or metros?: South Africa's exports of tradable urban services to the rest of Africa," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2020-94, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    7. Adaiah Lilenstein, 2020. "Better measures of progress: Developing reliable estimates of educational access and quality in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa," Working Papers 13/2020, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    8. Koomson, Isaac & Afoakwah, Clifford & Ampofo, Akwasi, 2022. "How does ethnic diversity affect energy poverty? Insights from South Africa," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    9. Tolcha, Tassew Dufera & Bråthen, Svein & Holmgren, Johan, 2020. "Air transport demand and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa: Direction of causality," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • L80 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - General
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O55 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Africa

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ctw:wpaper:201803. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Waseema Petersen The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Waseema Petersen to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpuctza.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.