Background: HIV counselling and testing (HCT) is a critical component of HIV prevention and treatment efforts. Between April 2010 and June 2011 South Africa ran an ambitious, multi-sector, campaign aiming to test 15 million people nationwide. We assessed the extent to which this campaign reached...

How much volatility is there in earnings in South Africa? The South African labour market has been shown to be a key determinant of welfare, both in terms of poverty and inequality. These are a function of both the high levels of unemployment as well as the wage distribution, conditional on...

How much income mobility was there in South Africa between 2008 and 2012? Did this mobility serve to equalise or disequalise longer-term measures of income? In this paper we address the first question by assessing the extent of absolute and relative economic mobility. We then turn our attention...

This paper discusses the changing profile of rural livelihoods in South Africa using the National Income Dynamics Study Waves 1 – 3 data (Southern Africa Labour & Development Research Unit (SALDRU), 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). The rural sector is undergoing a form of compositional change, with the...

In comparison to other continents, Africa has received little scholarly attention with regard to household composition. Household composition is endogenous to a variety of welfare issues and little is understood about the determinants of this composition. Understanding the household composition...

We use the first three waves of data from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) to analyse poverty dynamics in South Africa between 2008 and 2012. Restricting ourselves to the sub-sample of balanced panel respondents, we find that poverty exit rates increased with time, though a substantial...

This study evaluates food expenditure patterns in South Africa using the Engel framework which states that proportions spent on food fall with income. Non-parametric methods are used to estimate Engel curves, and regression analysis to evaluate the effects of several variables on shares of total...

Employing South Africa's first nationally representative panel data set, I find that having old age pension recipients in the household adversely affects employment outcomes of prime-aged adults both by reducing the probability that the unemployed find work and by increasing the likelihood that...

We document how we diagnosed data fabrication in the National Income Dynamics Study. Since the fabrication was detected while fieldwork was still on-going, the relevant interviews were re-conducted and the fabricated data were replaced with authentic data. To the best of our knowledge, this is...

Differential education expenditure by racial group was a pillar in the architecture of apartheid. School systems diverged by racial group, with large funding and curriculum differences (Fiske and Ladd, 2004). In 1994, spending on white learners was about 1.5 times the spending on urban African...