March 11, 2026Enhancing South Africa’s Business Environment to Boost Growth and Create Jobs

By Tidiane Kinda and Nasha Mavee

March 11, 2026

Comprehensive regulatory reforms, including a simplified and coherent national licensing and permitting policy, can help unlock the potential of South Africa's small businesses, drive growth, and boost employment

South Africa's economy has shown resilience in 2025. But growth remains too low to significantly reduce unemployment, which exceeds 30 percent overall and reaches 60 percent among young people. Fast-tracking ongoing reforms of electricity and logistics (under Operation Vulindlela) is critical to remove immediate impediments to growth. To fully unlock South Africa's growth potential, stimulate private investment, and boost employment, additional broad-based reforms are essential to further improve the business environment.

Indeed, operating a business in South Africa-especially dealing with product-market regulations such as required licensing and permitting-is significantly more burdensome, fragmented, and costly than in peer economies. These constraints deter investment and stifle innovation. And they are especially challenging for small-and-medium sized enterprises, which have limited resources to cope with red tape while accounting for the lion's share of job creation.

A costly regulatory burden

Our analysis-based on South African firm level data as well as cross-country data-points to the same conclusion. Not only are South African business leaders spending significant time dealing with government regulations, but this extra burden has been increasing over time and is among the highest relative to comparable economies.

How costly is this burden for firms? We find that firms whose managers devote more time to regulatory compliance experience slower sales growth, weaker employment growth, and lower productivity. For South African firms, these costs are particularly large: a one percentage point increase in management time spent dealing with regulations is associated with a one percent reduction in job growth. Moreover, for small South African firms with fewer than 20 employees, these regulatory burdens have nearly twice the impact on productivity compared to the average firm. These findings indicate that regulatory frictions directly undermine employment creation and especially the ability of small-and-medium sized enterprises to scale up, innovate, and create jobs.

Toward a more growth friendly business environment

There is a lot that policymakers can do to alleviate these constraints on the growth of firms and employment. The proposed Business Licensing Bill of 2025 offers an opportunity to modernize the current business licensing system, which is decentralized and leads to inconsistent enforcement, duplicative procedures, and misaligned fees across jurisdictions. Establishing a simplified and coherent national licensing and permitting policy could anchor reform efforts around several key principles:

• Streamlined digital platform. Clearly delineating responsibilities across levels of government and adopting a single window or centralized digital platform for license applications and tracking would reduce duplication, increase transparency, and shorten processing times.
• Capacity building. Strengthening administrative and enforcement capacity at the municipal level-through training, digital tools, and better intergovernmental coordination-would help ensure consistent and predictable implementation.
• Simplification for micro and informal firms. Tailored, concessional licensing arrangements, combined with digital onboarding and facilitated access to trading spaces, could lower regulatory, financial, and digital barriers for micro-enterprises and informal traders, encouraging entrepreneurship.
• Risk based licensing. Differentiating regulatory requirements based on the risk profile of activities-for example, food production versus retail clothing-would allow low risk businesses to operate with minimal regulatory burden while safeguarding public interests.
• Predictability. Introducing a public up-to-date inventory of all required permits and licenses.

Moving forward with these actions to deliver a more efficient and predictable licensing and permitting framework, together with other reforms making it easier for businesses to operate, are essential for South African firms to thrive, innovate, and generate much needed jobs. Our earlier analysis shows that reforms that close half the gap with emerging-market best practices on business environment, governance, and labor market could lift South Africa's real output by up to 9 percent over the medium term, raising annual growth from 2 to around 3 percent.

Simply put, durable growth that decisively reduces unemployment requires a decisive shift toward business-friendly structural reforms.

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Tidiane Kinda is the IMF's senior resident representative for South Africa, and Nasha Mavee is the local IMF economist.