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BL Premium reports that a former senior Treasury official has called for the government to be more ambitious about public employment projects, by balancing more spending on social grants with more spending on public employment, particularly for young people.
UCT’s Andrew Donaldson, who served for many years as the Treasury’s deputy director-general in charge of the public finance and the budget offices, said the rapid scaling up of the presidential employment stimulus over the past two years showed that the government could “think big” about public employment. But such programmes should be thought of as permanent ones that SA would need for a long time, rather than as just relief programmes. The government should also be scaling up measures such as tax credits to incentivise labour-intensive private sector employment. “Relative to what government is spending on social grants, it is still spending far too little on public employment programmes,” Donaldson said on Tuesday. In the context of the extension of the R350 a month social relief of distress grant and the debate about a basic income grant, the government needed to be sure to get the balance right between income support for households and support for public and private job creation, he said. His comments come at a time when SA’s official unemployment rate has reached 35%, with an economic growth rate that is likely to come in well below 2% this year and over the next two years in a rapidly weakening global economy. Describing SA’s unemployment rate as “catastrophically high”, Donaldson said other countries usually integrated income support for work seekers as part of the unemployment benefit and employment search programmes and SA should look at doing the same.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Hilary Joffe at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
- Read too, We can beat unemployment through state jobs schemes, says former Treasury official, at GroundUp
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page