The Contribution of Income Components to Income Inequality in South Africa. A Decomposable Gini Analysis.

much new work has been devoted to deriving and extending decomposable inequality and poverty measures which bridge the gap between description and analysis by throwing light on the processes undergirding inquality and poverty. For example, an application that has obvious policy relevance in the South Africa milieu is the use of decomposition techniques to partition inequality into within-race group and between-race group components. This paper pushes such a programme by using a decomposition technique based on the Gini coefficient to discern the relative importance of the major income components in determining overall income inequality.