This paper presents key findings from a livelihoods survey of households in four poor neighbourhoods in the Western Cape district of Ceres, one of the centres of South Africa's deciduous fruit export industry. It explores the nature and dynamics of the persistence of poverty in the context of...

This paper explores the challenge of understanding chronic and structural poverty in South Africa, and questions the dominance of the econometric imaginary in present-day development and poverty studies. It argues that measurement-based, econometric approaches to chronic poverty are dependent...

This paper considers the impact of cash transfer programmes for the old in Brazil and South Africa on poverty among households with older people. Using datasets collected specifically for the purpose, the paper constructs conditional and unconditional estimates of the poverty reduction capacity...

Ten years after liberation, the persistence of poverty is one of the most important and urgent questions facing South Africa. This paper reflects on some of the findings of research undertaken as part of the participation of the Programme on Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of...

This paper examines recent contributions to the analysis of poverty, particularly those emphasising the constraints on the poor posed by social relations and institutions that systematically benefit the powerful. It proposes an analytic framework for study of the causes of poverty, responses to...

Using three waves of the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS), panel data collected in South Africa’s most populous province between 1993 and 2004, this paper re-investigates patterns of chronic and structural poverty previously identified from the first two waves. The 2004 wave...

Since 2003, South African policy discourse about persistent poverty has been dominated by the notion that poor people stay poor because they are trapped in a ‘second economy', disconnected from the mainstream ‘first world economy.' This paper considers the adequacy of this notion in the...