ارزیابی برنامه ریزی شده از یک برنامه کار مورد نظر: ادغام فرضی در یک ماتریس حسابداری اجتماعی از آفریقای جنوبی

To analyze policy impacts of a targeted employment program calls for a new approach of estimation. This study proposes a simple modification to a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) in order to analyze the multiplier effects of a new sector. A different input composition, or technology, of the sector with targeted job provision makes a conventional analysis of final-demand injections on existing sectors invalid. Instead of a costly fullscale rebalancing, we apply the modification—so-called hypothetical integration—into a SAM to assess a proposed expansion of social care sector within the Expanded Public Works Program in South Africa.

Input–output multiplier analysis has been one of the workhorses for ex-ante employment impact assessment. Its comprehensive description of an economic structure enables one to map out industry-level employment generation due to an external shock, such as government fiscal expansion. Social accounting matrix (SAM) as an extension of the input–output approach adds socio-economic aspects, i.e. workers and their household characteristics, coherently into the framework. Multiplier analysis based on SAM thus provides an adequate simulation platform to analyze policy impacts on disaggregated subgroups of households as well as industries. The method however rests on the supposition that the technical coefficients of production remain constant. Hence, modification of the SAM is necessary if an intended simulation exercise entails, in one form or another, a new technology requirement. A government fiscal expansion, intended to provide jobs to a specific subpopulation group who are otherwise marginalized in the labor market, may require contractors to use a more labor-intensive production technology than a conventional one would demand. This type of intervention, in effect, changes the technology coefficients of the recipient industry, and it should appear as a new industry in the SAM for more accurate estimation. However, rebalancing the SAM can be costly and sometimes does not augment any economic meanings. This paper proposes a simple method to overcome the limitation in context of a policy simulation for South Africa. As is well known, South Africa is experiencing one of the highest rates of unemployment among middle-income countries, reaching 25 to 30% over the last decade. To ameliorate the associated socioeconomic pressures, in 2004 the government introduced a direct job creation initiative, the Expanded Public Works Program (EPWP), which has yielded some positive outcomes, but has been incommensurably small to the scale of needed intervention. Currently the scaling-up of the EPWP is under discussion and much research is under way. It is within this context that a modeling exercise was undertaken to assess the economy-wide, potential effect of a substantial expansion of EPWP with focus on different labor factor specifications that brought to light the theoretical and practical issues discussed below. There are four main EPWP sectors designated for job creation, one of which is the EPWP social sector. This simulation exercise has focused on scaling-up the home and community-based care (HCBC) and early childhood development (ECD) programs, both of which are part of the EPWP social sector. Besides enhancing income and reducing unemployment, such social-sector job creation also results in reducing women's burdens of unpaid care work. HCBC workers perform a variety of tasks needed for the homebound and chronically ill (including HIV/AIDS patients), while ECD workers provide support to childcare centers in tasks that range from sanitation and meal preparation, to mental stimulation and psychological safety for children aged 1–6 years. The original estimates on types and numbers of proposed jobs—as well as associated implementation costs—are from an extensive study by Friedman et al., (2007) of the Health Systems Trust.1 EPWP consists of job opportunities provided to unskilled, unemployed, and marginalized poor individuals who work in projects that are labor intensive. They are hired at a minimum wage and, while receiving training and accreditation, they provide services for their communities. These projects are therefore not typical in comparison to the existing South African economic structure and cannot be represented by production conditions of similar sectors in the private or public domain. Along with employment targeting, the effectiveness of the program mandates that technologies be used to maximize the labor content. Any multiplier analysis of such a program should not rely on simulating an injection of public funds in sectors whose production technology is not subject to this mandate. Rather, the injection should introduce the new particularities and features of this government intervention. Hence, the EPWP technology, represented as more labor-intensive input composition in our study, must be introduced anew. Moreover, job targeting requires a separate, new account that is not governed by the existing employment distribution structure of South Africa. Therefore, to integrate these two technical requirements, modification of the existing SAM is required. A simple hypothetical integration method is developed in this paper to circumvent a rebalancing of the SAMwithout sacrificing the accuracy ofmultiplier-effect analysis.Without a balanced SAM, simulation results violate the accounting identity principle in that total revenue does not equal to total expenditure for each account. The imbalance contradicts the underlying equilibrium concept in the multiplier analysis. Many examples of previous research that have required SAMmodification can be found in the literature. For instance, Khan and Thorbecke, (1989) subdivided sectors (mainly agriculture) into modern and traditional ones to make evident technological dualism, namely the difference in technologies used. Cella, (1984),Milana, (1985), Clements, (1990), and Dietzenbacher et al., (1993), in order to estimate the value of a sector, engaged in hypothetical extraction by replacing the sector's domestic use and supply of goods with imports, thus eliminating the existing sector's linkages to the rest of the economy. The hypothetical extraction, combined with sectoral decomposition as in Khan and Thorbecke, (1989), may seem an alternative way to evaluate the impact of the proposed expansion of the public care sector.However, the unique labor requirement of the EPWP does not resemble the existing care sectoreducation and health care- in the SAM. Therefore, the extraction approach based on the decomposition of the sector is not feasible. This paper uses an integration of a new hypothetical sector, called EPWP social sector (or EPWP in short) from an exogenous injection into the SAM by modifying the scale of the new sector. The scalingdown generates insignificant values for new accounts associated with the sector and, hence, may not violate an acceptable margin of error used in a conventional technical balancing. The insignificant values however preserve backward linkages that generate multiplicative effects of the intervention on the sector. The method is also flexible enough to incorporate policy exercises (in this study, employment targeting for the poor) into the SAM. The usual practice of SAM rebalancing does not apply in this study, as a prior information basis on which minimum entropy method relies does not exist. The maximum entropy approach that does not require the prior information could be used for rebalancing, but at the cost of abandoning some useful prior information, such as a SAM from a previous time period. Moreover, technical balancing without any reference to compare before-and-after balancing (to evaluate the success of balancing) does not yield valuable knowledge upon which to analyze the impacts of the sector, especially when it comes to the hypothetical sector. The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 provides a general description of the SAM structure and specific features of the South African SAM (SAM-SA) used in this paper; Section 3 describes the reformulation of SAM-SA for this exercise; an introduction to the fixed-price multiplier appears in Section 4; and the results and comparative analyses of the simulation are presented to draw attention on the need for reformulation in Section 5.

We simulate and analyze the distributional impact of scaling-up of social service delivery under the Expanded Public Works Program in South Africa (EPWP). The social service includes home and communitybased care and early childhood, and the scaling up expect to provide jobs to unemployed workers in poverty under the auspices of the EPWP. To depict the distributional impact, we use the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM)-based multiplier analysis. The method elucidates the circular flow of funds through which supply and demand of products and factors augment income and expenditure, and in turn expand the economy. The multiplier effect of direct job provision to the poor alleviates high degree of income inequality from racially and spatially biased unemployment. The positive impact however does not come into effect in the analysis, because the SAM is a balanced matrix that delineates only an existing flow of funds, like an accounting table. Simulation of the policy that features a new channel of flows to the poor requires modification of the matrix, preferably without a technical hassle. Reformulation can be simple without compromising the balance of the matrix. A hypothetical input composition—intensive use of unskilled poor workers, for instance—embedded in the policy can add to the matrix as a new sector. The hypothetical integration establishes new channels of flow of funds to poor households from job targeting, and thus increases their employment, and hence, income more than it would be otherwise under the existing unequal income structure. Our comparative analysis demonstrates the pro-poor nature of the job targeting. The method proposed in this paper allows flexible use of the SAM in a policy simulation exercise, in particular, for a large-scale socio-economic policy.