Economic diary November 14-18

INVESTORS’ focus will be on the release of South Africa’s unemployment rate for the third quarter (Q3) and the release of the retail sales at the end of September.

On the global front: retail sales and inflation rate data for most developed countries during October will be released.

The industrial and manufacturing data of a few developed economies will also be of note. The Q3 economic growth rate for Germany and the EU will be important, as will the release of various US housing data.

Domestic Tomorrow:

Unemployment rate Q3 – Stats SA Retail sales year on year – September: Stats SA

Wednesday: Globally Today:

China: Retail sales – October; EU: Industrial production – September; Japan: Industrial production – September

Germany gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate Q3; France: Inflation rate – October: UK: Inflation rate – October; EU: GDP growth rate Q3: US:

Tomorrow:

retail sales – October; Export and import prices – October and NY Empire State manufacturing index – November

US: Core PPI – October; Industrial and manufacturing production – October and NAHB housing index – November

Australia employment change – October; UK: Retail sales – October; EU: Inflation rate – October; US: Weekly jobless claims; Housing data – October and Inflation rate – October

Germany: PPI – October; EU: Current account – September; Canada: Inflation rate – October

Wednesday: Thursday: Friday:

With these transformations possibly resulting in a series of financial, political and military crises business leaders need to adapt to change more than ever.

On the positive side, we concur with the belief that the challenges will be mitigated, because a number of new jobs will be created in new and emerging industries, and in localised and personalised businesses. Businesses can protect themselves by becoming part of the change. This would include driving these changes instead of being driven by them.

Further protection could result from upskilling staff skills enabling them to fill new and emerging jobs and from promoting required changes in education models thereby enabling the development of 21st century workers. This is especially important as current education models are flawed by design – they prepare people for the skills of the past, not the skills of the future.

We can’t produce the skilled employees we need with education models that:

Give people standard tasks when creativity is a key human skill that is hard for technology to replicate.

Create competitive education environments when collaboration skills will be key to adaptation to the changes we will experience.

Encourage a blaming rather than an exploratory and learning culture.

Focus only on cognitive abilities instead of emotional intelligence and cognitive skills.

Remove IT and devices from educational environments when IT is everywhere.

However, the responsibility to protect employees does not rest only with business but with employees themselves. Employees can make themselves competitive in the future socio-economic and technological environment via a transition to learner centred lifelong learning. This lifelong learning will require individuals to learn, unlearn and relearn skills.

The Brics skills development working group plans to conduct research on the jobs of the future producing an atlas of emerging jobs for South Africa and Brics.