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Globalisation has reshaped capital flows, technology transfer, and labour market dynamics. In South Africa, these dynamics are particularly important given the country’s post-1994 reintegration into the global economy and its persistently high unemployment despite financial liberalisation. This study analyses the effects of financial globalisation on employment in South Africa between 1990 and 2022, distinguishing between its de facto and de jure dimensions. Using annual secondary data, the study applies the Autoregressive Distributed Lag modelling framework and Toda–Yamamoto causality tests to assess directional causality and finds that the two dimensions behave differently. De facto financial globalisation has a positive long-run elasticity of 0.14 with respect to employment, marginally significant at the 10% level. Whereas de jure financial openness carries a negative and largely statistically insignificant coefficient. Causality runs from financial globalisation to employment, and de jure openness follows rather than anticipates actual flows, indicating that South Africa’s financial liberalisation framework is more reactive than proactive. The findings suggest that employment depends less on formal liberalisation than on whether capital flows are channelled into productive, labour-absorbing investment, and support policies that condition financial openness on industrial and skills development rather than pursuing openness for its own sake.