South Africa should be looking to productive services to create sustainable employment, not to agriculture or manufacturing, University of Toronto Center for International Studies professor Albert Berry stated at a recent discussion held in Tshwane.

Speaking at a Human Sciences Research Council function, he said that South Africa should learn from other countries, particularly other mineral-dependent states, and look to creating jobs in the service sector.

“If you are thinking about creating a significant amount of jobs in the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, you can forget about it, as no country has accomplished this in the last 50 years,” Berry stressed.

He explained that even in a country where agriculture and manufacturing were doing well, such as Indonesia, which, in its second growth phase, generated a significant amount of jobs through its manufactured exports, 50% of new jobs still came from the services sector.

“During fast and slow growth in mineral-dependent economies, most new employment opportunities arise from the service sector,” Berry stated.

But he added that a strong manufacturing sector was important for the quality of jobs created in services. “High-productivity manufacturing may generate more service jobs for each manufacturing job than low-productivity manufacturing does,” Berry added.

But for a country to create sustainable growth in employment, it also needed to have equally-distributed income, especially in the middle-income range, and this was particularly important in South Africa's case.

“The challenge of income equality is equal to the challenge of employment creation,” he emphasised.

“You really have to be worried about income equality if you are in a minerals-dependent economy,” he reiterated.

He also said that although solid economic growth was necessary for job creation, it was not necessarily sufficient.

“Even if a country succeeds in growth, it does not necessarily mean it will succeed in job creation,” he stressed.

Berry studied nine countries, where growth was accelerated and was sustained at a level of 6% or more.

He also looked at four minerals-dependent countries, two of which also exhibited accelerated and sustained growth.

“South Africa needs to learn from other countries about the process of growth and its impacts on employment and equality,” he concluded.

The South African government has launched an initiative dubbed the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa (Asgisa), which aims to increase South Africa's economic growth rate to at least 6% by 2010.

It also aims to halve unemployment and poverty by 2014.