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...

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...

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...

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...