Western Cape Treasury says Cape Town remains the province’s economic powerhouse, but growth is still not creating enough jobs to reduce unemployment and poverty.
It presented its 2025/26 Municipal Economic Review and Outlook for the City of Cape Town to the Provincial Parliament’s Budget Committee on Wednesday.
The report assesses the metro’s economic performance during the 2024/25 reporting period.
According to the department, Cape Town generated 72% of the Western Cape’s economy and accounted for nearly two-thirds of all jobs in the province.
Despite this, unemployment remained high at 25%.
Treasury economist Ashley Rasool said the city’s economy is driven by finance, business services, transport, and communications, which mainly create high-skilled jobs.
He warned that economic growth without enough job creation widens inequality and increases the risk of social unrest.
“It’s the match and the balance of play between employability and GDPR performance because GDPR growth without labour absorption is nothing. If anything, it exacerbates inequality, social ills and rears its ugly head in protests and social unrest from a socio-economic perspective.”
He adds that while Cape Town continues to attract jobseekers, the economy is simply not expanding fast enough to absorb the growing number of job seekers.
“This is not a dig on the city but in terms of the South African economy we have an economy that is not growing yet we have a job seeker pool that is growing year-on-year. With the city in particular, you will find that you have an inward migration of net job seekers but not necessarily the economic opportunities to absorb them and therein lies the problem.”
Ntuthuzelo Nene
www.ewn.co.za