{"id":91245,"date":"2026-05-15T13:15:04","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T13:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/?p=91245"},"modified":"2026-05-15T13:15:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T13:15:06","slug":"outlier-155-jhb-vs-cape-town-jobs-commercial-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/2026\/05\/15\/outlier-155-jhb-vs-cape-town-jobs-commercial-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Outlier #155: JHB vs Cape Town jobs, commercial crime"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\ud83e\uddf3 Unemployment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This week the latest Quarterly Labour Force Survey results were released by Statistics South Africa and the news wasn\u2019t good. The number of unemployed people increased by 301,000 compared with the last quarter of 2025. The unemployed rate rose to 32.7% from 31.4% in Q4 of 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Of South Africa\u2019s nine provinces, the Eastern Cape has the highest unemployment rate at 44.6%, followed by the Free State at 37.8%. The Western Cape, on the other hand, has the lowest unemployment rate of all the provinces at 19.6%, the only province well below the national average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gauteng, South Africa\u2019s economic engine, has an unemployment rate of 34.1%. KwaZulu-Natal was the only province where employment grew, and the unemployment rate decreased to 31.2% from 32.3% in Q4 of 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Drilling down to the percentage of working age adults who are employed in the main metros in Gauteng and Western Cape, the different trends are quite clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Johannesburg has the largest working-age population of any South African metro. It has 4.3-million people aged 15 to 64. Yet fewer than half (45.2%) of them have jobs. A decade ago, in 2015, Johannesburg had the highest employment-to-population ratio at 56.3%, but it has dropped in part because of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the contraction of labour-intensive industries, such as mining and construction, between 2014 and 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In December 2015, Cape Town and Johannesburg employment levels were even around 54-55%. Since then Johannesburg has dropped to 45.2%. Cape Town, on the other hand, has mostly recovered from the Covid decline and is now a full 11 percentage points ahead of Johannesburg and almost two percentage points above its December 2015 rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

eThekwini (45.9%) and Buffalo City (45.6%) also have higher employment-to-population ratios than Johannesburg, according to the latest Statistics South Africa Quarterly Labour Force Survey (Q1 2026).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nelson Mandela Bay and Mangaung are both at the bottom of the ranking with employment-to-population ratios lower than 40%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Produced in part in partnership with\u00a0Our City News<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\ud83d\udea8 Convictions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The number of people being convicted of commercial crimes has dropped significantly in the past two decades, while the number of reported crimes has increased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The National Prosecuting Authority has a dedicated unit \u2013 the Specialised Commercial Crimes Unit (SCCU) \u2013 to prosecute fraud, corruption and money laundering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the prosecuting unit, South Africa also has Specialised Commercial Crime Courts. Most of the SCCU\u2019s cases are prosecuted in these courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both the unit and the courts are securing fewer convictions than before, despite more courts being opened and more magistrates and prosecutors being appointed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By 2018, ten specialised courts were delivering only about 76 convictions per court annually. By 2023, there were 22 specialised courts delivering only 15 convictions each per year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A main bottleneck appears to be on the investigation side. In 2023\/24, more than 128,000 commercial crime cases were reported to police. Only 15,000 arrests were made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the full\u00a0<\/em>GroundUp<\/em><\/a>\u00a0article here.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Click here for a link to all references for this newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\ud83d\udce2 Reimagining census data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

South Africa is changing fast and geospatial data is one of the most powerful tools we have for keeping up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Join our\u00a0Out to Lunch on 27 May 2026 at 1pm<\/a>\u00a0for a conversation with Ross Solomons, senior geospatial specialist at\u00a0GeoTerraImage<\/a>, and Elsie Zwennis, their marketing and communications manager. Together they will unpack how data is collected, modelled and analysed to better understand where we live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Free live. Recording for Outlier members. Questions ahead of time to\u00a0gemma.ritchie@theoutlier.co.za<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Register to attend for free<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91249,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1386,1387,1380],"tags":[1270,40,18],"newsletter-post":[],"site":[],"class_list":["post-91245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-publication","category-the-outlier","category-this-week-in-charts","tag-quarterly-labour-force-survey","tag-south-africa","tag-unemployment"],"acf":{"big_number":"","big_number_caption":"","big_number_link":"","big_number_background":"","big_number_text_colour":"#000000","big_number_icon":false,"big_number_wide":"yes","featured_chart":false,"flourish_chart_id":"","flourish_sub_title":"","flourish_chart_width":"medium","is_newsletter_post":"No","post_style":"bc","show_on_front":"Yes","link_through":"Yes","chart_url":"","background_colour":"#0089AA","text_colour":"#FFFFFF"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91245"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91252,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91245\/revisions\/91252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91245"},{"taxonomy":"newsletter-post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newsletter-post?post=91245"},{"taxonomy":"site","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outliereditor.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/site?post=91245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}