The major cause of poverty is unemployment. This paper looks at aspects of the way government responds to claims that are made, chiefly by academics, about poverty and unemployment. Official statistics on poverty and unemployment enjoy little favour among senior politicians and civil servants....

South African experience with efforts to implement land reform thus far indicates that to realize the potential and help solve the problems rural areas face, the government's land reform program needs to get beneficiaries, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector more involved....

Increasingly complex societies necessitate the collection of more information, or more sophisticated ways of estimation. This places upward pressure on the cost of collecting such information, as family structures are more complex, mobility more frequent, and willingness to provide information...

The panel study known as the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) has been extended by a new wave of data collection conducted in 2004. This third wave of the study interviewed 865 households containing core adult members from 760 of the households contacted in 1993. It also conducted...

While conventional explanations of drop-out and grade repetition acknowledge the role of socioeconomic factors, this paper uses data collected in a KwaZulu-Natal study of adolescents to investigate the explicit contribution of poverty and shocks to school disruption episodes. The...

The aim in this study is to determine the nature of the causal relationship, if any, between 'social capital', as measured by household membership in formal and informal groups and household welfare in South Africa. Using a recently collected panel data set in South Africa's largest province, we...

The article evaluates household vulnerability after the 2000 flood in two poor communities of the Limpopo Province, South Africa. The study analyses the forms of vulnerability which disasters such as floods present. Using data gathered from a survey of households, the study presents the impacts,...

This study of three black rural areas of South Africa shows that apartheid has institutionalized circulating rural-urban migration and significantly affects social and economic fabrics. The areas studied had a high male absentee rate and were poor. Incomes were unequally distributed, with the...