This paper provides a brief summary of key labour market outcomes in Wave 2 of NIDS and also examines labour market transitions that occurred between Wave 1 and Wave 2. This corresponds approximately to changes between 2008 and 2010. The primary purpose of this paper is to spur discussion of...

The labour market is central in determining individual and household well-being in South Africa. Therefore, an understanding of earnings and employment dynamics is a key policy issue. However, the absence of panel data has constrained empirical work addressing these topics. This paper conducts...

The paper analyses poverty and inequality changes in South Africa for the period 1996 to 2001 using Census data. To gain a broader picture of well-being in South Africa, both income-based and access-based measurement approaches are employed. At the national level, findings from the income-based...

This paper sets out the methodological issues for the measurement of poverty before presenting a poverty profile of South Africa. It tests the sensitivity of the poverty profile to choices around the metric used to measure well-being, the equivalence scale used and the level of the poverty line....

The existing work on household poverty and inequality in South Africa has shown that poverty and inequality differ markedly by race, location, education, gender of the head, household demographics and household labour market participation. The models confirm the ongoing importance of race as a...

At the time of the transition to democracy in 1994, the South African social security system was already notably well developed for a middle income country (Lund 1993; Van der Berg 1997; Case and Deaton 1998). This fact can be ascribed to the way in which the system developed under apartheid as a...

Gauging levels of welfare using data on income and expenditure is informative yet limited and can be enhanced by including non-money-metric measures. Nationally representative data sets from 1993 and 2010-2011 which cover a broad set of domains are used to calculate a multidimensional poverty...

This paper surveys the South African and international literature surrounding the impact of cash transfers on labour supply. We find that although social transfers are condemned for creating state-dependency, the reality is that their effect on labour force participation is both ambiguous and...

In comparison to other continents, Africa has received little scholarly attention with regard to household composition. Household composition is endogenous to a variety of welfare issues and little is understood about the determinants of this composition. Understanding the household composition...

The first democratic elections in 1994 brought about the promise for equal opportunity and an overall improvement of living standards for the majority of the South African population. However, 20 years after the democratization of South Africa, levels of inequality remain stubbornly high. The...