This paper attempts to investigate the impact of sectoral wage laws in South Africa. Specifically, we examine the impact of minimum wage laws promulgated in the Retail, Domestic work, Forestry, Security, and Taxi sectors using 15 waves of biannual Labour Force Survey data for the 2000-2007...

This paper attempts to estimate the causal effect of government enforcement on compliance with minimum wages in South Africa, a country where considerable non-compliance exists. The number of labour inspectors per capita is used as a proxy for enforcement, whilst non-compliance is measured using...

This paper attempts to understand some of the key drivers of employment and earnings trends within the South African labour market in the 15 years following the demise of apartheid. A number of factors are discussed which feature in the understanding of South Africa’s labour market dynamics in...

This paper investigates the labour market destinations of graduates from seven higher education institutions in South Africa. A three-step estimation procedure is employed in which the relative importance of covariates such as age, race, and gender in each stage from educational attainment to...

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...

Assessments of the impact of minimum wages on labour market outcomes in Africa are relatively rare. In part this is because the data available do not permit adequate treatment of econometric issues that arise in such an assessment. This paper attempts to estimate the impact of the introduction...

As the 20th anniversary of the transition to democracy approaches in 2014, the economic policy debates in South Africa are in full flow. The forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Economics of South Africa contributes to the policy and analytical debate by drawing together perspectives on a range...

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices which, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The...

Minimum wage legislation is central in South African policy discourse, with both strong support and strong opposition. The validity of either position depends, however, on the effectiveness of minimum wage enforcement. Using detailed matching of occupational, sectoral and locational codes in the...