In this opinion piece on South Africa’s unemployment crisis, Andrew Donaldson argues that while structural reforms are needed to raise growth and broaden development over the longer term, an employment-oriented economic strategy is the central challenge in present times.

Viewed through an elementary growth accounting lens, South Africa’s frontiers of labour-intensive production should be steadily moving out, bringing unemployed human resources into economically useful occupations. We have abundant physical and mental human capabilities searching for work.

However imperfect the adjustment (“tâtonnement”) process, economic theory implies that there should be progress towards full employment, and higher output should flow from the mobilisation of otherwise unutilised capacity. And if markets don’t generate this result, it is a policy coordination function.

It is not that constructive applications are hard to identify. Houses need to be built, roads repaired, food markets expanded, clothing and furniture supplied, safety and security improved, water sources protected, children cared for.

It is not that we lack the know-how or technological capabilities required: these are activities in which knowledge is readily available and there is clear evidence of under-utilised productive capacity. To put unskilled labour to work, we do not need to overcome technological barriers in artificial intelligence, biosciences or big data processing.

It is not that higher production to meet domestic consumption needs might have unsustainable fiscal or balance of payments effects: in horticulture, timber and related products, light manufacturing, and a wide swathe of commercial and hospitality services there are growth opportunities in tradeable goods and tax revenue will flow from expanded activity.

Of course, there are complementarities in the resource combinations required to expand economic activity: engineering skills accompany artisanal capabilities and physical effort on building sites and floor managers oversee the organisation of work in restaurant kitchens and clothing assembly lines.

But the best available theories of skills development suggest that it is the application of learning by “doing” that is the proximate driver of productivity and skills acquisition.