Understanding and characterizing the services sector in South Africa: An overview

Type Working Paper - DPRU Working Paper 201803
Title Understanding and characterizing the services sector in South Africa: An overview
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2018
URL http://www.dpru.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/image_tool/images/36/Publications/Working_Papers/DPRU​WP201803.pdf
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.

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