Treasury’s big plan to take on ‘job shedding’ – and make sense of South Africa’s city chaos
National Treasury has launched the Spatial Economic Activity Data South Africa (SEAD-SA) programme – a project aimed at making sense of the geographic distribution and characteristics of economic activities within the country.
Speaking at the programme’s official launch on Monday (19 June), finance minister Enoch Godongwana said that the government is giving R6.3 billion in financial support to South Africa’s metros through grant instruments over the medium term.
However, the country’s biggest cities are operating on incomplete or lagging data, making it difficult to plan and set effective policies for how this money would be targeted and spent.
“Metros did not know where firms and jobs were located within their boundaries and how firm and employment activity changed over time. The cities explained that this meant that they were making policy, planning and investment decisions on modelled and incomplete data, largely accessed at a cost from the private sector,” the minister said.
This feeds into all aspects of cities’ economic activities – from spacial planning, job creation, and social initiatives to tax collection.
Godongwana noted that metros are the country’s job generators, and this role needs to be supported through public sector planning and investment both from an economic and human settlements perspective.
New data shows “job-shedding” within strategic industrial spaces in the metros, however, with more than half of the top 30 metro industrial spaces losing jobs since 2014.
“Sector composition across metros differs. The collapse of one metro could result in the collapse or severe decline of specific industries. This has major ramifications for the country as a whole owing to the extensive national, regional and global value-chains that firms participate. The message is that as a country we cannot allow a single metro to fail,” he said.
Some progress in filtering the chaos has already been made – the first Metro Spatialised Economic Activity Reports were produced by National Treasury in April 2021, providing time series data between 2013 and 2018 that demonstrated firm and employment trends across metro spaces.
The SEAD-SA will build on this, the minister said, bringing on board various partner entities and agencies to compile comprehensive data.
To this end, the minister added that the SEAD-SA programme is not owned by any particular entity.
“It is a shared brand that is intended to act as an umbrella for joint efforts in ensuring open access to credible spatialised economic activity data from multiple public and private administrative data sources,” Godongwana said.
This includes:
- A partnership between National Treasury and the HSRC and its University of Free State partner to deepen analytical capabilities and develop policy briefs.
- The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and SECO are coming on board over the next 8 years.
- The UK FCDO has mobilised the UK’s Office of National Statistics to provide technical support.
The South African Revenue Service (SARS) is also collaborating, having extended the exploration of a spatialised version of the entire SARS Integrated Business Register, to enable access to additional public and third-party data sources. The agreement is to integrate this with Stats SA’s National Statistics System.
“The country cannot afford low returns on public sector investment, firm closures and downsizing or job losses. Reviewing this data, its value in providing clear policy directions and evidence to assist government make tough investment choices and decisions, is abundantly clear,” the minister said.
Loading ...