Although the economy has registered positive economic growth over the past 15 years since the demise of apartheid, the formal sector in South Africa has been unable to provide adequate employment for labour. Against a background of the recent almost global recessionary climate, this lack of employment is a serious problem. While government has responded with many initiatives to deal with employment creation, unemployment rates in South Africa remain high. In this paper the problem of low employment economic growth performance is initially examined for the period 1994 -2008 by drawing on the Harrod-Domar model and then over a longer time period by using regression analysis. The paper uses a parsimonious regression model to highlight the probable links between changes in economic growth and changes in employment. The growth elasticity of employment over the 1994-2008 period is low and over a longer time horizon the marginal growth employment effect is weak.
Countries in Africa are increasingly becoming similar in outlook, especially as regards monetary policy. With a view to conducting a long-term study of monetary policy in Africa, we apply an empirical test for the coherence of inflation targeting, first conducted by Nell (2003 ) for South Africa, to data from Rwanda. We find that like South Africa, Rwanda has a stable money demand function and the adoption of an inflation target is a wise policy option. Also, the Rwandan money market needs just over five quarters to eliminate half of any monetary disequilibrium. These results are of some interest to economists and policy makers for all the countries in the increasingly interconnected continent of Africa. Copyright (c) 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2006 Economic Society of South Africa.
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