Namibia has a long history of providing a universal and non-contributory old age pension, child grants using means testing and quasi-conditionalities, and other cash transfers. Multivariate analysis presented in this paper confirms that these transfers play an important role in alleviating...

This article considers the evolution of ideas in development theory on the role of the state in development in an attempt to draw inferences for South Africa. It offers a critique of the neoliberal view and presents the revisionists' insights on why entrepreneurial action, institutional building...

Many recent studies compared the 1995 October Household Survey (OHS) with the latest available Labour Force Survey (LFS) to derive the unemployment 'trends' in South Africa since the transition, but this approach only gives a snapshot of unemployment at two points in time. Although the better...

One of the most pressing socio-economic problems of the South African economy is high youth unemployment. Recent studies only briefly examined how youths have fared since the transition by comparing the 1995 October Household Survey with a Labour Force Survey, and hardly investigated whether the...

There is limited consensus on how to define informal employment in South Africa, but in the South African and international literature the three most common ways of capturing informal employment are the enterprise, employment relationship and worker characteristics approaches. This paper reviews...

Under apartheid, the trappings of a welfare state for whites were created. Over time, social security was gradually extended to other groups, and recently social assistance benefits were equalised. This left South Africa with high social security levels for a middle-income developing country....

This paper demonstrates that poverty and inequality trends can diverge. It then discusses inequality trends and shows that, despite measurement issues, there is consensus that inequality is very high and has been rising over much of the post-transition period. Due to rising inequality within all...

In light of the economic, political and social significance of the middle class for South Africa's emerging democracy, we critically examine contrasting conceptualisations of social class. We compare four rival approaches to empirical estimation of class: an occupational skill measure, a...

Existing empirical research on consumption patterns of the South African black middle class leans either on the theory of conspicuous consumption or culture-specific utility functions. This paper departs from treatment of the black middle class as a homogeneous group. By differentiating between...

Social spending has become a major tool of targeting resources to South Africa's poor. The poor now get considerably more than their population share of social spending, but the underlying distribution of income is so skewed that overall post-fiscal inequality has not improved much....