In brief, the paper firstly summarises old and new theoretical and technical issues on measuring poverty, secondly analyses poverty from different perspectives and highlights various research findings on poverty trends in South Africa and thirdly clarifies the notion of 'second economy' and...

This paper reports on research that involved the analysis of 873 Commission for Conciliation Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) arbitration awards sampled from unfair dismissal and unfair labour practice cases for the years 2003 to 2005. The sample of awards was selected in proportion to the case...

The research examines the current state of collective bargaining, the nature of existing bargaining structures, alternative models that have developed, and the problems being experienced in the current system. The impact of collective bargaining on small business is also an aspect of the...

By monitoring the price changes experienced by some representative household, consumer price indices provide an important measure of changing purchasing power within a given economy. Group price indices offer one method of more accurately reflecting the inflation experiences of specific types of...

This paper conducts a review of the literature on skills shortages in South Africa. It is demonstrated that different Government departments have different views concerning the definition of skills shortages. This is largely due to the omission in any official government literature of tying the...

This is an overview of poverty and well-being in the first decade of post-apartheid South Africa. It is an introduction to a volume that brings together some of the most prominent academic research done on this topic for the 10-year review process in South Africa. This overview highlights three...

The idea of a second economy has become a feature of recent government economic policy. In this paper we focus on one important element of the second economy - the informal economy. We analyse the nature of the informal economy in South Africa, providing some descriptive statistics and analysis...

This paper seeks to investigate some of the changes that have occurred within the South African labour market in the post-apartheid era between 1995 and 2004 and some of the challenges the labour market presents in the attainment of shared growth, updating previous work by Bhorat and Oosthuizen...

Using a constructed data series and another data series based on the All Media and Products surveys (AMPS), this paper explores trends in poverty and income distribution over the post-transition period. To steer clear of an unduly optimistic conclusion, assumptions are chosen that would tend to...

This paper investigates the relationship between education and unemployment in post-apartheid South Africa, and probes the argument that employment growth has been inhibited particularly by skills constraints. We use probit regression analysis to show that higher education protected against...