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 country study evaluates the experience of the South African economy with respect to growth, poverty and inequality trends since the advent of democracy in 1994. The postapartheid government took a definite turn toward greater spending on social security, while job creation and a narrowing...

This paper aims to introduce selected issues from the international literature on skills training into the South African policy forum. Reform of national strategies in skills production has characterised a number of industrial as well as certain developing economies in recent decades. Their...

This paper is a response, from a business perspective, to Halton Cheadle's concept paper titled 'Regulating flexibility: Revisiting the LRA and the BCEA' (DPRU Working Paper 06/109). This paper seeks to respond to each of the issues raised by Cheadle, and to his reflections on each. As...

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...

The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive measure of shifts in welfare in post-apartheid South Africa by examining changes in both income and non-income welfare between 1993 and 2005. Previous research using expenditure or consumption-based measures of income has shown that,...

Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas), established in terms of the Skills Development Act, 97 of 1998, were launched amid much fanfare and expectation of delivery towards achieving a skills revolution in the country. Upon their immediate establishment in March 2000, these perceived...

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...