This paper reviews the system for social cash transfers in Namibia, a middle-income country with a long experience in making available a universal and non-contributory old age pension, child grants using means-testing and quasi-conditionalities and other cash transfers. The paper traces the...

This paper analyses a previously unused source of data – the All Media and Product Survey (AMPS) – to arrive at alternative estimates of the post-transition poverty path. The motivations for using this non-official data source are twofold: concern over the comparability of the existing...

This paper makes a unique contribution to the South African literature in combining data from an alternative source of household survey data – the All Media and Product Survey (AMPS) – with national accounts income trends for this country, in the recent tradition of research on the world...

To a large degree, the notoriously high levels of income inequality in South Africa have their roots in differential access to wage-earning opportunities in the labour market, which in turn are influenced by family background. This paper therefore investigates the role that parents’ education...

Using a constructed data series and another data series based on AMPS (the All Media and Products Survey), this paper explores trends in poverty and income distribution over the post-transition period. To steer clear of an unduly optimistic conclusion, assumptions are chosen that would tend to...

VAT without any exemptions or zero-rating is regressive. Since the inception of VAT in South Africa, there has been an ongoing debate around the issue of zero-rating to alleviate the burden on poor households. This paper uses vegetables as an example and conducts tax incidence analyses to...

The persistently high unemployment rate has always been one of the most pressing socio-economic problems of the South African economy. There is a general consensus that unemployment is structural, as there is a mismatch between the skills demanded by employers for the available jobs and the...

The National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), introduced since 2008, has become an alternative data source for the South African poverty and inequality analyses. In addition to the fact that NIDS is the first national panel study of individuals in South Africa, it is also the only survey that...

Census 1996 and Census 2001 are the only all-inclusive censuses conducted by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) under the new democratic dispensation, providing information on demographics, educational attainment, migration status, labour market status, economic activities, income, housing, and...