But this doesn’t mean that the labour market for the highly skilled is a healthy one. The elevated wages in this market feed our high levels of inequality and contribute to inflation. Furthermore, skills shortages are a problem for economic growth and employment creation.
Workers of different skill levels are complementary “goods”; with more engineers you can employ more construction workers to build more bridges. What this segment of the labour market needs, in the longer run, is more and better education to open the highly skilled job market to more South Africans and better match what students study with the skills required by the private sector.