This paper constructs a 'synthetic panel' from successive years of the October Household Surveys and Labour Force Surveys, and shows that new insights into the South African labour market are revealed when groups of individuals, defined by their date of birth, are followed from 1995 to 2004....

I argue that the estimation technique - widely used in the poverty mapping literature - introduced by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw, is highly sensitive to specification, severely biased in finite samples, and almost certain to fail to estimate the poverty headcount consistently. First, I show...

This paper investigates the impact of livestock farming on rural livelihoods on redistributed commonage land in Namaqualand post-1994. The paper contends that farming has been declining for decades, where its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has declined from 10% in the 1970s to...

We show that the pseudo empirical maximum likelihood estimator can be recast as a calibration estimator. The process of estimating the probabilities pk of the distribution function can be done also in a maximum entropy framework. We suggest that a minimum cross-entropy estimator has attractive...

The publication by Servaas van der Berg and his colleagues at the University of Stellenbosch last year of a set of estimates of poverty headcounts and gaps, pointed to substantial success in the battle against poverty in South Africa in the period 2000-2004, an improvement attributable mainly to...

This paper examines the impact of South Africa’s state old age pension on the labour supply of working age members of pension-receiving households. A range of identification strategies are employed in an attempt to make full use of recent labour force survey data. Results suggest fairly...

In the absence of South African longitudinal data for the ten years post apartheid, national cross-sectional household survey data is frequently used to analyse change over time. When these data are stacked side-by-side however, they reveal inconsistencies both in trends across time and between...

When asset indices are used in regressions the coefficients obtained are typically difficult to interpret. We show how lower bounds on expenditure effects can be extracted, if the relationship between the assets and expenditure can be calibrated on an auxiliary data set.

Influx controls of the apartheid regime have had lasting consequences for South African residential and migration patterns. This is particularly the case for the Western Cape that receives about 48000 immigrants a year, with the notable streams of immigrants emanating from the Northern and...

We investigate the balance between work (including home production), leisure and personal care (chiefly sleep) within South African households. We use the South African time use survey which enables us to obtain a better measure of the division of total labour (paid and unpaid) within South...