Why unemployment is so high in South Africa, prologue

I'm considering a smallish project: trying to tease out the factors which make for South Africa's staggering unemployment rate—at last count 25 percent. I've been reading up on it a bit myself and soliciting questions from some random economist types (also, to see if there is any consensus at all).

A further question is how it manages to survive with such a problem. That level of unemployment was a grinding, horrible crisis which shook the foundations of our democracy during the Great Depression, but South Africa has been dealing with it basically since 1994, when it could actually be called a real country.

Stay tuned for further developments.

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