The emphasis on location-specific factors, such as climate or disease environment, in the explanation of development outcomes in colonial societies implicitly assumes that settler groups were homogenous. Using tax records, this paper shows that the French Huguenots who immigrated to Dutch South...

The arrival of European settlers at the Cape in 1652 marked the beginning of what would seemingly become an extremely unequal society, with ramifications into modern-day South Africa. In this paper, we measure the income inequality at three different points over the first century of Dutch rule...

The question about the productivity of slavery is a strongly debated issue, for example in the USA the seminal work by Engerman and Fogel (1974), “Time on the Crossâ€, sparked a flurry of publications debating the issue from different angles. The debate about the economic worth of...

In the late 1990s the South African Department of Education implemented two policies that were meant to reduce the large number of over-age learners in the school system: schools were no longer allowed to accept students who were more than two years older than the correct grade-age and students...

Inequality is a major concern in many of the world’s developing regions. South Africa is no exception, as the voluminous literature on the subject attests to (see Bhorat and Kanbur 2006, for example). Indeed, modern South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world, primarily...

This paper takes advantage of the wealth of cross-sectional household surveys conducted after South Africa’s political transition, in order to gain insights into the causes of the acceleration in the already high unemployment rate. A synthetic panel dataset is constructed to decompose...