PhD Seminar: Frank Tao

Racialised Structural Transformation in Late-Apartheid South Africa: Employment, Productivity, and Labour-Market Change, 1970--1991

Abstract: This paper studies employment change in South Africa during the final decades of apartheid. At first sight, the data show a familiar structural-transformation pattern: employment moved out of the low-productivity primary sector and into higher-productivity secondary and tertiary sectors. However, using transcribed sector-by-race employment data, it shows that the aggregate shift was driven mainly by changes in African employment. African employment declined sharply in the primary sector, while White, Coloured, and Asian primary-sector employment remained much more stable; African secondary-sector employment was more volatile, while non-African employment rose more steadily; and tertiary employment expanded across all racial groups, though unevenly across subsectors. A sector-race decomposition finds that African sector effects account for most of the aggregate structural shift. The paper therefore links what looks like developing-country employment structural transformation to a historically specific process of racialised labour-market change under apartheid. Late-apartheid employment change combined non-African stability and expansion with African sectoral reallocation and rising labour-market pressure, a pattern consistent with the broader crisis of African unemployment, social unrest, and institutional strain before South Africa's political transition in the 1990s.