This paper uses the the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a longitudinal survey of young people in Cape Town, to analyze the impact of short-term household economic shocks on the schooling outcomes of South African youth. In addition to detailed information on schooling and employment, CAPS has...

We begin by summarising the literature that has assessed medium-run changes in poverty and inequality in South Africa using census data. According to this literature, over the 1996 to 2001 period both poverty and inequality increased. In this paper we assesses the robustness of these results to...

This paper analyses labour market behaviour of the elderly in South Africa, focusing on the Black/African population group. The analysis uses data from the 2001 census and 1996 census, the Labour Force Surveys for September 2000 and 2001, and the Income and Expenditure Survey for 2000. Findings...

Sustainable poverty reduction requires that poor households effectively manage risk. The absence of basic financial services is a major obstacle to poverty reduction in South Africa. This paper reviews available South African literature on utilisation of formal and informal risk management...

This paper examines the impact of formality of employment on the utilisation of financial services, using data from the October 2000 Income and Expenditure Survey and the September 2000 Labour Force Survey. The presence of an employed member in the household is seen to be important for the...

This paper investigates changes in and patterns of income inequality in South Africa during the post-apartheid period 1994 to 2004. While findings show a rapidly growing high-income African population (a trend that began before 1994 and continued thereafter) as well as rising real wages for...

Rapid increases in educational attainment and the massification of secondary education in South Africa resulted in substantial differences in the supply and quality of educated workers across generations. This paper describes changes in the distribution of education across birth cohorts and how...

Teenage childbearing is considered a social problem with costs to the teenage mother, her child and society at large. In South Africa, media attention suggests a contemporary crisis in teen childbearing; often linking this to a fear that the Child Support Grant incentivises motherhood among...

Access to new nationally-representative, individual-level panel data from South Africa has allowed for the revalidation of Kingdon and Knight's (2006) discussion on the definition of unemployment. This paper investigates subjective wellbeing as a measure of comparison between labour market...

Following the international literature, income inequality decompositions on data from contemporary South Africa show that the labour market is the key driver of overall household inequality. In order to understand one of the channels driving this labour market inequality, we use national...