Statistics South Africa announces that unemployment rose by 0.5 percentage points to 27.6% in the first quarter of this year. The figures confirm economists’ presumption that economic growth in the first quarter was negative and unemployment remains one of SA’s biggest challenges.
The SA economy started on a bitter note this year with unemployment rising to 27.6% after being 27.1% in the fourth quarter of 2018. The number of people employed is significantly less than a year ago and declined by 86,000 people to less than 16.3 million people.
By contrast, the number of unemployed increased by 3.7% to 6.3 million and the number of discouraged job seekers by 7.5% to nearly 3 million. This means that nearly 9.2 million South Africans of working age are not in school, do not study further and are not voluntarily unemployed. The figures come from Statistics SA’s quarterly employment survey (QLFS) for the first quarter of 2019, but growth fig
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