Only 13% of the South African working population is employed full time, according the to the Gallup Global Employment tracker.
Gallup, a global performance-management consulting company, found that about one in four (26%) – or 1.3 billion – people in the world worked full-time for an employer in 2013.
This Payroll to Population (P2P) rate, which reports the percentage of the total adult population that works at least 30 hours per week for an employer, has not grown since 2012, the group said.
Unsurprisingly, countries with the highest P2P rates are some of the wealthiest, or those with the higher GDP per capita.
The UAE was listed as the country with the highest rate of full-time employment with a P2P rate of 59%, followed by Iceland (54%), Bahrain and Sweden (53%) and Russia (51%).
Highest P2P rates
| # | Country | Rate |
| 1 | United Arab Emirates | 59% |
| 2 | Iceland | 54% |
| 3 | Bahrain | 53% |
| 3 | Sweden | 53% |
| 5 | Russia | 51% |
| 6 | Kuwait | 49% |
| 7 | Belarus | 47% |
| 7 | Israel | 47% |
| 9 | Latvia | 44% |
| 10 | United States | 43% |
Countries with the lowest rates of permanent employment were poorer nations, such as Burkina Faso (5%), Haiti, Malawi and Niger (6%).
“Countries with the lowest P2P scores tend to have large informal economies with high self-employment, which at the global level has a negative relationship with GDP per capita,” Gallup said.
Lowest P2P rates
| # | Country | Rate |
| 1 | Burkina Faso | 5% |
| 2 | Haiti | 6% |
| 2 | Malawi | 6% |
| 2 | Niger | 6% |
| 5 | Ethiopia | 7% |
| 5 | Sierra Leone | 7% |
| 7 | Guinea | 8% |
| 7 | Liberia | 8% |
| 7 | Mali | 8% |
| 8 | Chad | 9% |
| 8 | Nepal | 9% |
| 8 | Tanzania | 9% |
The figures are based on more than 136,000 interviews across 136 countries in 2013 (around 1,000 per country), in which adults were asked a battery of employment questions modeled on the International Labour Organization’s standards.
Adults who are self-employed, working part time, unemployed, or out of the workforce as payroll-employed in the P2P metric, were not included, and the numbers are not seasonally adjusted.
Regionally, Northern America (43%) and countries in the former Soviet Union (42%) had the highest P2P rates in 2013.
Sub-Saharan Africa had the lowest regional employment rate at 11% – down 1% from 2012. South Africa’s rate was listed at 13% – representing about 2.6 million people.
South Africa has a working population of close to 20.4 million people.
According to Stats SA, South Africa’s unemployment figure has climbed to reach 25.5%, with 5.2 million people currently unemployed, while some 15.1 million people in the South African work force are employed in both the formal and informal sector.
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