The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

The purpose of the paper is to identify areas in South Africa where social-economic disparity exists using 2011 census data. Different indices are used to measure spatial disparity with the aim of finding the most appropriate approach for measuring disparities under different circumstances. The...

This paper revisits the earlier assessments of the Palma Proposition and the ‘Palma Ratio’. The former is a proposition that currently changes in income or consumption inequality are (almost) exclusively due to changes in the share of the richest 10 per cent and poorest 40 per cent because...

A comparison of the United States and South Africa is instructive in understanding how complicit behavior perpetuates institutional racism. In both the United States and South Africa, police and prosecutors have often faced accusations of racially biased decisionmaking. Racial bias is not a new...

In a polarised and highly unequal country such as South Africa, it is unlikely that a definition of the middle class that is based on an income threshold will adequately capture the political and social meanings of being middle class. We therefore propose a multi-dimensional definition, rooted...