Diagnosing South Africa’s High Unemployment and Low Informality

This report analyzes the causes and consequences of South Africa’s high rates of unemployment and the unique nature of labor market exclusion in the country. It leverages a combination of new quantitative analysis using South African datasets and international datasets for benchmarking, together with synthesis of existing literature and case studies. The goal is to: (1) characterize the challenge of labor market exclusion in South Africa, (2) identify ways in which this is similar and different to other countries, (3) understand what drives the unique challenges of the labor market in South Africa, and (4) narrow down what policy areas are most important to address the underlying drivers. This report takes a diagnostic approach to understand the causes of South Africa’s unique pattern of low informality.

More (Inclusive) Entrepreneurship in South Africa: The Role of Franchising

This paper explores franchising in South Africa, and its potential to help resolve the economy’s challenges of low entrepreneurship and concentrated ownership. South Africa features a large franchising sector, with half a million formal workers and a large number of small businesses owners competing directly with vertically integrated chains. Traditional franchising may not have much space for further growth as a percentage of the economy, but it can be made more inclusive with innovations in franchise finance that broaden the base of potential franchisees, as well as enforcement of consumer protections to ensure franchisee-franchisor relationships are balanced. The expansion of the franchising model to less capital-intensive business concepts and serving lower-income consumers (micro-franchising) is one area with expanding growth potential for the country, while the application of the franchising model to public services and socially driven organizations is less promising. Finally, while the franchising model is only directly applicable to particular sectors, there are features of franchising and the capabilities built up around the franchising that could be applied to other priority areas of the economy, in particular to smallholder agriculture. The success of traditional franchising shows the power of a menu of standardized proposals and contracts in a marketplace with a range of franchisors (in this case, up- and downstream agriculture corporates) offering different opportunities to potential franchisees (in this case, smallholder farming communities), along with training and technology transfer at scale.

Unraveling the Complexity: A User-centered Design Process for Narrative Visualization

In this case study, we introduce a user-centered design process for developing Metroverse, a narrative visualization platform that communicates urban economic composition and growth opportunities for cities. The primary challenge in making Metroverse stems from the complexity of the underlying research and data, both of which need to be effectively communicated to a wide range of end-users with different backgrounds. To unravel the complexity of the research, and to design the platform, we followed a user-centered design process. Our design process brought together researchers, designers, and various end-users, who collectively guided the design of the narrative visualization. Engaging end-users in the early phases of the project allowed us to identify the valuable insights in the data and subsequently design effective visualizations that convey those insights. We believe findings from our process can provide a template for similar projects that require translating complex research data and methodologies into user-friendly story structures.

Watch Paper Presentation at CHI 2023: The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

A Measure of Countries’ Distance to Frontier Based on Comparative Advantage

This paper presents a structural ranking of countries by their distance to frontier. The ranking is based on comparative advantage. Hence, it reveals information on the productive capabilities of countries that is fundamentally different from GDP per capita. The ranking is centered on the assumption that countries’ capabilities across products are similar to those of other countries with comparable distance to frontier. It can be micro-founded using standard trade models. The estimation strategy provides a general, non-parametric approach to uncovering a log-supermodular structure from the data, and I use it to also derive a structural ranking of products by their complexity. The underlying theory provides a flexible micro-foundation for the Economic Complexity Index (Hidalgo and Hausmann, 2009).

Bridging the short-term and long-term dynamics of economic structural change

In the short-term, economies shift preferentially into new activities that are related to ones they currently do. Such a tendency should have implications for the nature of an economy’s long-term development as well. We explore these implications using a dynamical network model of an economy’s movement into new activities. First, we theoretically derive a pair of coordinates that summarize long-term structural change. One coordinate captures overall ability across activities, the other captures an economy’s composition. Second, we show empirically how these two measures intuitively summarize a variety of facts of long-term economic development. Third, we observe that our measures resemble complexity metrics, though our route to these metrics differs significantly from previous ones. In total, our framework represents a dynamical approach that bridges short-and long-term descriptions of structural change, and suggests how different branches of economic complexity analysis could potentially fit together in one framework.

The Quest for Increased Saudization: Labor Market Outcomes and the Shadow Price of Workforce Nationalization Policies

Few countries have embraced active labor market policies to the same extent as Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the imperative of increasing Saudi employment became paramount. The country faced one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world while over 80 percent of its private sector consisted of foreign labor. Since 2011, a wave of employment nationalization efforts has been mainly implemented through a comprehensive and strictly enforced industry and firm specific quota system known as Nitaqat. This paper assesses the employment gains as well as the costs and unintended consequences resulting from Nitaqat and related policies between 2011 and 2017. We find that while job nationalization policies generated significant initial gains in Saudi employment and labor force participation, the effects were heterogeneous across workers, firms and sectors. Moreover, our analysis suggests that the resulting unintended consequences far outweighed the benefits over time generating a less cost-effective and productivity inhibiting labor market composition.

Understanding Saudi Private Sector Employment and Unemployment

This paper analyzes the changes in Saudi employment and unemployment between 2009 and 2018 and argues that a supply-demand skill mismatch exacerbated by insufficient job creation, and prevalent Saudi preferences and beliefs about employment underpin the high unemployment problem that coexists with low Saudi employment in the private sector in the country.

Inequality, Openness, and Growth through Creative Destruction

We examine how inequality and openness interact in shaping the long-run growth prospects of developing countries. To this end, we develop a Schumpeterian growth model with heterogeneous households and non-homothetic preferences for quality. We show that inequality affects growth very differently in an open economy as opposed to a closed economy: If the economy is close to the technological frontier, the positive demand effect of inequality on growth found in closed-economy models may be amplified by international competition. In countries with a larger distance to the technology frontier, however, rich households satisfy their demand for high quality via importing, and the effect of inequality on growth is smaller than in a closed economy and may even be negative. We show that this theoretical prediction holds up in the data, both when considering growth in export quality at the industry level and when considering growth in GDP per capita.

Uncertainty in the Search for New Exports

This paper explores the role that uncertainty plays in the emergence of new products or services for export in developing countries. Using a comparative case study method, I explore the degree to which those entrepreneurs who discovered new export activities faced uncertainty, and what the nature of this uncertainty was. I then document how this uncertainty, when present, was resolved, and how this affected subsequent diffusion of the newly discovered activity. The cases suggest two important dimensions of uncertainty in the emergence of new export activities: productivity characteristics and demand characteristics. A new activity could feature one, both, or neither types of uncertainty. The reasons for lower inherent uncertainty in these cases suggest a new theory of product similarity that is heterogeneous, multi-dimensional, and operating at a highly disaggregated level. Furthermore, the degree of uncertainty has implications for the expected ‘triggers’ of discovery, and these are born out in the cases. Finally, when uncertainty was present, its resolution often provided significant benefits to subsequent entrants, and the manner in which high uncertainty was overcome suggests potential avenues for policy.

Assessing Ukraine’s Role in European Value Chains: A Gravity Equation-cum-Economic Complexity Analysis Approach

We analyze Ukraine’s opportunities to participate in European value chains, using traditional gravity models, combined with tools from Economic Complexity Analysis to study international trade (exports) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This toolbox is shown to be predictive of the growth and entry of new exports to the EU’s Single Market, as well as foreign direct investments from the Single Market in Ukraine. We find that Ukraine has suffered from a decline of trade with Russia, which has led not only to a quantitative but also a qualitative deterioration in Ukrainian exports. Connecting to western European value chains is in principle possible, with several opportunities in the automotive, information technology and other sectors. However, such a shift may lead to a spatial restructuring of the Ukrainian economy and a mismatch between the geographical supply of and demand for labor.