The factors influencing academic success of first-year Economics students have received much attention from researchers. Very little attention, however, has been given to the determinants of success of senior Economics students. In the USA, Graunke and Woosley (2005: 367) indicate that college...

A policy of free basic services (water, sanitation and electricity) was introduced by the government in 2000 to provide basic services to households unable to afford these services. The policy allows for six kilolitres of water free monthly to all households, irrespective of household size or...

The deteriorating performance of first-year Economics students has become a concern at many South African universities. Addressing the issue requires a thorough understanding of the factors influencing students’ success. Studies analysing academic performance usually use the education...

The needs to find ways of lifting people out of poverty and to transform the existing patterns of inequality in South Africa are high on the country’s development agenda. Much hope is often vested in education as an opportunity for children from poor households to overcome the disadvantage of...

This paper examines South African wage earnings trends using all the available post-1994 household survey datasets. This allows us to identify and address the sources of data inconsistencies across surveys in order to construct a more comparable earnings time series. Taking account of the...

Using a constructed data series and another data series based on AMPS (the All Media and Products Survey), 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 reviews the system for social cash transfers in Namibia, a middle-income country with a long experience in making available a universal and non-contributory old age pension, child grants using means-testing and quasi-conditionalities and other cash transfers. The paper traces the...

There is an abundance of literature adopting the monetary approach (i.e., using per capita income or expenditure variables) to derive poverty and inequality trends for South Africa since the transition. The most commonly used data sets used for these analyses are the censuses and the Income...

This paper reviews the Stats SA methodologies to measure informal employment before and after the introduction of the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS), as well as other recently proposed approaches (e.g., Devey, Skinner and Valodia, Heintz and Posel, etc.), so as to investigate the...

According to the 2006 September Labour Force Survey, approximately 22% of the employed (excluding domestic workers and agricultural employment) are engaged in informal sector activities as their main work to sustain themselves and their dependents. Given the large size of the informal sector in...