South Africa
Worsening relative bond spreads in early 2008 - an Eskom effect ? appears in OECD Economic Surveys: South Africa: Economic Assessment.
This chapter zooms in on the role that community education and training could play in the South African post-school education system. The current adult education system only provides for adult basic education, as enshrined in the South African constitution. This chapter explores what other types of training could be provided by the community education and training system, and who should be the main target audience. The chapter provides good practice example from other countries and concrete actions that can be taken to advance and position the community education and training system in South Africa.
In recent years, the BCIS governments have incorporated the goal of reducing poverty and inequality into their approaches to more sustainable growth and have enacted some reforms in that direction. Tackling inequality traps requires improving economic opportunities for all, and this covers a variety of policy actions. Labour market and social policies have an important role to play, as they directly or indirectly affect household incomes. In countries with significant labour market segmentation between formal and informal employment, policies and measures directed exclusively at the formal labour market have a small influence, limiting their impact on reducing poverty and inequality. But, labour market policies can have a considerable impact on maintaining this labour market duality by making employment expensive and favouring underemployment and informality. In this kind of configuration, they could even become counterproductive with respect to reducing poverty and inequality.
This chapter describes the stakes between water and the environment, water and the economy, and water and social inclusion in Cape Town. It then underlines how megatrends including climate change, economic growth, demographic changes and urbanisation are exacerbating water risks. Finally, it presents some key lessons learned from the water crisis, arguing that the drought resulted from multifaceted causes including reliance on vulnerable surface water resources, issues with data modelling and resource planning, or co‑ordination and governance weaknesses. Nevertheless, the water crisis lessons are currently proving useful to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2018, the city of Cape Town, South Africa, was close to the “Day Zero”, requiring all taps to be shut off and citizens to fetch a daily 25 litre per person. Though the day-zero was avoided, it is estimated that, at the current rate, South Africa will experience a 17% water deficit by 2030 if no action is taken to respond to existing trends. Lessons learned during that drought crisis have been valuable for the city to manage the short-term COVID-19 implications and design long-term solutions towards greater water resilience. As a result of a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue involving 100+ stakeholders from the city of Cape Town and South Africa, this report assesses key water risks and governance challenges in Cape Town, and provides policy recommendations towards more effective, efficient and inclusive water management building on the OECD Principles on Water Governance. In particular, the report calls for strengthening integrated basin governance, transparency, integrity, stakeholder engagement, capacities at all levels of government, financial sustainability and for advancing the water allocation reform to better manage trade-offs across multiple users.
This chapter classifies and defines cities in South Africa from a migration vantage point. It first focuses on the differential urbanisation concept as a systemic framework that can explain how urban systems evolve and how the process determines the position and expected dynamism of individual cities within the urban hierarchy. Within this theoretical framework, the chapter reviews population redistribution patterns in South Africa since the mid- 1990s and compares them to population redistribution processes in the three largest urban agglomerations of South Africa. Finally, population redistribution movements in and around these core cities are used to explain: i) current morphological trends; ii) the relationship between the core cities and their surrounding cities; iii) the interpretation of functional and administrative space in terms of these trends. The chapter also reflects on the potential value to adapt the OECD methodology of functional urban areas to South Africa.
Unemployment rates for different racial groups, 2000-07 appears in OECD Economic Surveys: South Africa: Economic Assessment.