A “cooking” summer holiday season in South Africa’s Western Cape province, which includes the tourist mecca of Cape Town, spurred a surge in hiring, its top official said.
(Bloomberg) — A “cooking” summer holiday season in South Africa’s Western Cape province, which includes the tourist mecca of Cape Town, spurred a surge in hiring, its top official said.
The coastal region created 167,000 jobs in the three months through December, a 7% increase from the previous quarter that was more than any of the other eight provinces, according to data published by Statistics South Africa. The domestic tourism industry was the main driver of employment, followed by the financial and services industries, Premier Alan Winde said in an interview in Bloomberg’s Cape Town office on Wednesday.
“This December we had 191 direct international flights coming into Cape Town a week,” he said. “We did a million tourists through our airport in the summer season.”
Statistics agency data show the number of tourists visiting South Africa in December, traditionally the most popular holiday month, increased by 158% from a year earlier. The previous two summer seasons were affected by coronavirus restrictions.
The Democratic Alliance, South Africa’s biggest opposition party, runs the Western Cape. Its outright majority in several of the region’s districts, clean municipal audit outcomes and ability to shield parts of the province from severe national power outages has bolstered regional business confidence and created an environment more conducive to job creation, Winde said.
(Updates with percentage increase in second paragrah.)
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