The official unemployment rate in South Africa reached 32.5% in the fourth quarter of 2020, an increase of 1.7% from the previous quarter, and now the highest since statistics were first published, beginning in 2008.
Interestingly, as the government Statistics SA office reports in its Quarterly Labor Force Survey, the number of employed persons actually increased in the fourth quarter by 333,000 to 15 million, However, the number of unemployed persons increased by twice that much, 701,000 to 7.2 million.
