Measuring Cultural Employment in South Africa A comparison between the UNESCO Guidelines

Overview

The cultural and creative industries are increasingly being recognised as making a significant contribution to employment. To date, there has been no systematic attempt to define and measure cultural sector employment in South Africa using national data. Analysis of such data could provide great insight into the magnitude of cultural sector employment in South Africa in comparison to the labour market overall, economic growth, and international trends in cultural employment. It would make a significant contribution to understanding the role and potential of the cultural sector in employment creation in the country.

The aim of this report was to determine to what extent the classification systems for occupations and industries used in South Africa fits the classification system used by UNESCO in their Survey of Cultural Employment Statistics Manual (2015) because it is important to produce internationally comparable statistics.

The findings of this research show that the South African Labour Force Survey provides a potentially useful source of data on employment in the cultural industries, although the classification system used by South Africa is somewhat different from that used by UNESCO. It is judged that internationally comparable data for cultural employment in South Africa could be produced. However, matching cultural employment to cultural and non-cultural industries is likely to be a much more challenging task.

It is recommended that the next stage of this research should be to start with defining cultural occupations using the South African LFS classification system, and then populating the framework with data from the LFS going back overtime.