Drawing from a 2010 study of women receiving the Child Support Grant in an urban area of South Africa, this article discusses the link between social protection, women's empowerment and the well-being of children. It appears that the Grant enhances women's power and control over household...

Common perceptions about broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) have been that it is nothing more than a tool for the already affluent to access further wealth and has limited potential to address the economic exclusion of the most marginalised. An analysis was conducted of data on black...

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...

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...

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....

This study investigates whether health spending and access to services in South Africa have become more or less pro-poor over time. We find that over the post-apartheid period health spending has become significantly more pro-poor. In addition to the rising share of the health budget allocated...

Based on a graphical and statistical analysis of 1993 survey data, this article shows that educational inequalities among black school-age children were substantial and systematically associated with socio-economic status. Children of more affluent, better educated and metropolitan parents...

Although racial data are no longer available, this article uses a 1997 dataset to compare education spending with the pre-democracy situation. The new government emphasised fiscal resource shifts to eliminate spending discrimination rather than changing educational outcomes. Fiscal resource...