South Africa lost more than 890,000 jobs, but saw an increase in the number of skilled workers from 1989 to 1999. We argue that this is the consequence of well-documented acute apartheid-era distortions which led to a current coordination failure where (i) firms are locked into a mostly...

This paper argues that the economic literature on unemployment and poverty in South Africa has under-explored potentially important feedback mechanisms which, because they serve to change the structure of labour markets and affect human capital trajectories, serve to endogenise labour market...

We develop a model where blacks in the private sector earn no returns to education if there are relatively too few educated blacks. Using a sample of black females in the late apartheid KwaZulu to control for labour market specific effects, we find that more than a fifth of labour market...