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Pretoria - South Africa’s official jobless rate eased to 25.0% of the labour force in the third quarter of 2011 from 25.7% in the second quarter, a report showed on Tuesday.
In its latest quarterly Labour Force Survey, Statistics South Africa said the total number of unemployed people stood at 4.442 million in the three months to September from 4.538 million in the second quarter.
Total employment grew by 1.5% in the third quarter - the highest gain since 2009 - with trade and finance the main sectors that created jobs.
Mandla Maleka, an economist at Eskom, said unemployment at 25.0% is still high.
“The number is still fairly elevated at 25.0% from 25.7%. Perhaps one can say that it is encouraging, but it does not really alleviate the problem itself. I think at 4.4 million people who are unemployed is still very high, but it is encouraging that it came down by 0.7 percentage points.”
The government has singled out unemployment as a major challenge after about a million jobs were lost in 2009 during the country’s first recession in nearly two decades.
South Africa is proposing sweeping changes to labour law intended to increase job security for temporary workers, but economists expect the shake-up will make unemployment worse and ramp up costs for employers.
The government has said the economy needs to grow by 7% a year to make a dent on unemployment, more than double the current rate of 3.1% seen for 2011.
