South Africa’s unemployment rate falls

South Africa’s unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of last year retreated from its highest in 13 years as key sectors hired more workers, data from the statistics office showed on Tuesday.
According to the data obtained in Pretoria, unemployment stood at 26.5 per cent of the labour force in the fourth quarter, down from 27.1 per cent in the third quarter.
In its quarterly labour force survey, which polls households, Statistics South Africa said this amounted to 5.781 million people without jobs in the fourth quarter compared with 5.873 million previously.
The office said the growth in employment was mainly driven by the services industry and the transport and manufacturing sectors.
The data showed that currency responded by firming more than 1 per cent to its strongest in three months against the dollar.
An economist at Nedbank, Johannes Khosa, said the South African data showed that economic conditions were improving.
He warned that the decrease in joblessness was coming off a very low base and that the improvement would be difficult to sustain.
“Remember the numbers are not seasonally adjusted and you find that firms tend to employ more people in the fourth quarter so it’s hard to read too much into the figures,” Khosa said.
South Africa’s economy is set to have expanded by only 0.4 per cent in 2016, according to the Reserve Bank, which also estimates growth of 1.1 per cent for 2017.
The figure is well short of the government’s target of 5 per cent annual growth.