Unemployment biggest culprit in South Africa’s inequality

Unemployment, and not low formal sector wages, is the biggest cause of inequality in South Africa, economist Mike Schussler argued at a presentation of trade union Uasa’s sixteenth ‘South African Employment Report’, in Johannesburg, on Tuesday. Noting that no other country among the 100 biggest economies in the world has had more than two decades of unemployment above 20%, he said South Africa’s low unemployment was what really impacted on the country’s Gini coefficient.