The benefit would accrue not just to those who are employed and are acquiring job skills and experience that they would not have gotten if they were unemployed. The benefit of tight labor markets is also in the signals they send to individuals and businesses that people should be employed as productively as possible, and that investment in training pays off.
To illustrate this point, I would like to quote from a speech made last year by President Thabo Mbeki, in which he talked of an African Renaissance and about the weight that past enslavement has placed on Africans’ confidence: “It continues still to weigh down the African mind and spirit, like the ton of lead that the African slave carries on her own shoulders, producing in her and the rest a condition which, in itself, contests any assertion that she is capable of initiative, creativity, individuality and entrepreneurship.”  5  BIS Review 98/1999  Initiative, creativity, individuality and entrepreneurship – we in the Committee of Central Bank Governors know the people of the SADC region possess these qualities in abundance.