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Fostering Technology Absorption in Southern African Enterprises
Notes 1. For example, Grant Thornton’s International Business Report 2010 reports that limited availability of skilled workers is the major constraint on business expansion in South Africa and is cited as such by 34 percent of businesses in the country. Similarly, 73 percent of South African chief executive officers (CEOs) surveyed in PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2010 Global CEO Survey expressed concern about the availability of key skills locally (see http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey and World Bank 2011a). 2. Unless noted otherwise, all data used in this section are from the parallel study World Bank (2011a). 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Africa#Education_under_ Apartheid. 4. Bhorat and Mayet (2011) refer to the presence of skill-biased technical change as the cause of the observed labor demand shift. However, given the marginal role of the manufacturing industry in employment growth (with a contribution of 6.5 percent during 1995–2009), rising skill intensity of employment might be more a result of the lack of development of low-skillintensive industries than of technology advances. The reason for this gap in skills deserves further investigation but goes beyond the scope of this report. 5. As important as it is, increasing the skill supply from the postsecondary education system is not a substitute for solutions to two other fundamental challenges: the quality of school education and the structure of the economy. The skill shortage problem cannot be completely resolved before major progress is made in improving school educational quality. And the skill shortage will be greater and persist longer for a given supply if the skill intensity of labor demand generated by the economic structure is greater and rises faster. 6. The matriculation completion rate among black and colored youth is less than 40 percent. Because matriculation is the lowest recognized qualification in South Africa, a large segment of the young population is left with nothing to signal its ability on the labor market (World Bank 2011a). 7. For example, in a survey of 9,885 FETI learners in 2009, 44 percent reported having had some form of workplace exposure during their studies, with half of these having been enrolled in a learnership or apprenticeship. The remaining 56 percent had no workplace experience (World Bank 2011a). 8. No data are available for Lesotho and Namibia. 9. The National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program sponsors a network of 240 industrially experienced technology advisers located throughout Canada to assist SMEs in all aspects of innovation, including referrals to qualified consultants. http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/ services/irap/advisory.html.