南アフリカ産業政策の展望

雇用問題解決への視点から

抄録

Democratized South Africa was born about 2 years ago with high expectation both domestically and internationally. The Government of National Unity (GNU), however, has been faced with serious dilemmas such as high unemployment, high income inequality, and low competitiveness.
This paper attempts to evaluate the past industrial policies and to examine the direction of new policies in South Africa as a way of describing a solution for the urgent unemployment problem. It would be said that the South African government has actively intervened in her manufacturing sector with high political motivations. In particular, the industrial decentralization policy had been promoted to justify segregated racial development since apartheid was introduced as a constitutional model in 1948. The manufacturing sector has achieved development under the import substitution policy since the 1920's. Moreover, it has tried to increase exports under the export promotion policy since the 1970's.
But new South Africa must reduce the level of protection and terminate export subsidies under the GATT/WTO agreement. According to one estimation, trade liberalization would cause a negative impact on employment in South Africa's manufacturing sector. Hence, the direction of trade policy reforms was one of the hottest issues among the former government, the ANC, the private sector and the World Bank in the early 1990's. The development of small businesses has also been a focus for job creation.
In order to increase exports and to compete against import goods, the improvement of competitiveness would be crucial in South Africa. Thus the government, trade unions and employer's associations should make for cooperation to create more jobs with international competitiveness, especially concerning the wage policy; maintaining the wage rate within the rate of increasing labor productivity and providing a flexible wage level in the former homeland. Furthermore, the government should offer training incentives for manufacturers as well as encourage them to invest more into human resource development.