In this paper we identify some of the drivers of changes in the distribution of earnings and earnings inequality in the South African labour market between 2000 and 2014. Although the overall level of earnings inequality between 2000 and 2011 was high and relatively stable, there were...

South Africa's Employment Tax Incentive, launched in 2014, aimed to address low youth employment by reducing the cost of hiring young workers. We make use of anonymized tax administrative data from the 2012-2015 tax years to examine the effect of the Incentive on youth employment. We match firms...

This paper provides within-country spatial and national inequality estimates in SSA using comparable data from the DHS. Two indicators are used to measure household welfare. First, detailed information on living standards indicators is used to calculate asset indices using data from 24 SSA...

This paper reviews the history of the noncontributory social pension in South Africa, as well as recent work on the distributional and poverty-alleviating effects of this program. The pension has a strong gender dimension, reaching three times as many women as men, and has an unambiguous impact...

The democratic government in South Africa has developed a system of social grants to combat the high levels of poverty and inequality inherited from the apartheid regime. With the help of modest economic growth and an associated increase in per capita hou

This article analyzes whether children born to teen mothers in Cape Town, South Africa, are disadvantaged in terms of their health outcomes because their mother is a teen. Exploiting the longitudinal nature of the Cape Area Panel Study, we assess whether observable differences between teen...

Asset indices have become widely used in a number of areas of social research, particularly in the analysis of Demographic and Health Surveys. Indeed the calculation of "wealth indexes" is now routine practice in the DHSs. Asset indices have been externally validated in a number of contexts....

The study of income inequality and income mobility has been central to understanding post-apartheid South Africa's development. This paper uses the first two waves of the National Income Dynamics Study to analyse income mobility using longitudinal data, and is the first to do so at a nationally...

We use longitudinal data from the National Income Dynamics Study to document the extent of recent short-term residential and household compositional change in South Africa. We analyse the demographic correlates of these transitions, including population group, age, urban/rural status, and...