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Incorrect beliefs about male circumcision and male-to-female HIV transmission risk in South Africa: Implications for prevention
No full textRandomized clinical trials (RCTs) have shown that medical male circumcision (MC) substantially reduces the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission.1 Driven by this evidence base, a growing number of countries have adopted large-scale MC campaigns in an effort to prevent heterosexually acquired HIV in men. In South Africa, for example, >130,000 medical male circumcisions were performed during 2010.2Encouraging adoption of MC will require educating millions of men and women about its protective benefits. The success of these policies will depend critically on what people infer from prevention information and the actions they take as a result.The authors would like to thank ikapadata for access to their opinion and belief poll data and Jan Schenk and Amrik Cooper for their patience and assistance in clarifying aspects of respondent selection and data capture. The authors also thank 3 anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of their article. The authors state that all errors are their own. Brendan Maughan-Brown is grateful for funding from the NRF Research Chair in Poverty and Inequality Research and the University Research Committee at the University of Cape Town for his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Determinants of black women's labour force participation in post-apartheid South Africa
No full textThis paper investigates the changes that occurred in black South African women's labour force participation (LFP) over the 1995–2004 post-Apartheid period. Using regression analysis of individual cross-section data for 1995, 1999 and 2004, we show that throughout this period higher education and urban residence were associated with higher LFP, whereas the reverse was the case for ‘non-labour income’, marriage and fertility. We also find that the increase in black women's LFP between 1995 and 2004 could be attributable mainly to increases in the returns rather than to changes in their labour market characteristics
Assessing the effectiveness of academic development programmes: A statistical analysis of graduation rates across three programmes
No full textThis article reports on a study that used statistical analysis to estimate the impact of the first-year academic development (AD) courses offered by three diverse AD programmes (in the commerce, engineering and science faculties) at the same South African Higher Education Institution (HEI). Specifically, in measuring impact the study compares the graduation performance of AD students relative to mainstream students. The study used a larger sample and a more comprehensive multivariate specification to identify the determinants of academic performance than previous studies. The study found that the AD programmes, as they were constituted during the period under investigation (1999–2003), did not improve the graduation rate achieved by AD students relative to
their mainstream peers. Therefore, the study raises the question as to whether the type of AD programme investigated can alone provide the solution to the problems faced by the South African HEI community in its efforts to meet the increased demand for graduates from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds
Is China “crowding out” South African exports of manufacturers
No full textThis paper analyses the impact of Chinese competition on South African manufacturing exports to its major markets in Europe, the USA and Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper considers four related research questions. First, are China and South Africa competing with each other in export markets, how extensive is such competition and how is this changing over time? Second, to what extent has Chinese competition led to the displacement of South African exports in its major markets? Third, in which countries have South African exports been most affected? Finally, which South African export sectors face the greatest threat from Chinese competition? We find that competition between South Africa and China has increased significantly over the past decade, particularly in African markets. This has been a result of growth of Chinese exports both at the intensive and the extensive margins, with the number of products which they export in common increasing, as well as China increasing its share of the import market for products which it already exported at the start of the period. All types of manufactured exports lost ground to China, but the impact is strongest in low technology products. South African exports have nevertheless increased from 2001. The “crowding out” that has been described in the paper is therefore a relative story and not one of absolute declines in South African exports. The “crowding out” also only refers to manufacturing and not to primary products where Chinese economic growth and demand for resources has enhanced South African exports to third countries through rising commodity prices.This paper is based on research carried out for project on “Chinese Competition and the Restructuring of South African Manufacturing” funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Grant No. ES/1035125/1. The project was administered by the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. The paper benefited from extensive comments by participants of a workshop organized by the Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies in Pretoria
The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview
No full textIntroduction: Earnings questions have been asked in South Africa’s national surveys annually since 1994. A key question for labour economists has been to track and explain the evolution of earnings over this post-apartheid period. Unfortunately, however, the measurement instrument has changed in ways that make it tricky to simply take the raw figures and compare them even if one restricts
the attention to the October Household Surveys and the various Labour Force Surveys. In this
paper we analyse some of the changes and indicate where corrections are needed. We implement many of these changes in the second release of PALMS, the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (Kerr, Lam and Wittenberg 2013).
The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 2 we review studies done on the earnings variables in the national surveys from Statistics South Africa, particularly those that comment
on the comparability of the variables over time. In Section 3 we pay attention in more detail
to the evolution of the measurement instrument. We then turn to an analysis of the actual responses in section 4 with a view to pinpointing where the underlying measurements may have changed. The following sections deal with ways of handling bracket information and missing data respectively . In section 8 we look at the impact of these data quality adjustments on the estimation of average real earnings over time.We acknowledge the support of an infrastructure grant to DataFirst from the Redi3x3 project on “Employment/Unemployment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth". The Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Fund of the University of Cape Town paid for the initial construction of the PALMS dataset without which this research would not have been possible
Genuine Fakes: The prevalence and implications of fieldworker fraud in a large South African survey
No full textWe document how we diagnosed data fabrication in the National Income Dynamics Study. Since the fabrication was detected while fieldwork was still on-going, the relevant interviews were re-conducted and the fabricated data were replaced with authentic data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that this has been done. We thus have an observed counterfactual that allows us to measure how problematic such fabrication would have been, had it remained undetected. We implement a number of estimators using the data that include the fabricated interviews, and compare these with the corresponding estimates that include the corrected data instead. For the outcomes that we consider, we find that the fabrication would not have substantially affected our univariate estimates. However, the fabricated data do impact substantially on some key covariates when panel estimators are used.Arden Finn is a doctoral student and researcher at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town. Vimal Ranchhod is an Associate Professor in SALDRU at the University of Cape Town.Arden Finn acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation's Human and Social Dynamics in Development Grand Challenge.
Vimal Ranchhod acknowledges support from the Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation
The weight of success: The body mass index and economic well-being in South Africa
No full textWe show that body mass increases with economic resources among most Southern Africans, although not all. Among Black South Africans the relationship is non-decreasing over virtually the entire range of incomes/wealth. Furthermore in this group other measures of “success” (e.g., employment and education) are also associated with increases in body mass. This is true in both 1998 (the Demographic and Health Survey) and 2008 (National Income Dynamics Survey). A similar relationship holds among residents of Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, and Namibia. This suggests that body mass can be used as a crude measure of well-being. This allows us to examine the vexed question in South African labor economics whether there is involuntary unemployment. The fact that the unemployed are lighter than the employed, even when we control for household fixed effects, suggests that they are not choosing this state
Evaluating the prospects of benefit sharing schemes in protecting mountain gorillas in Central Africa
No full textPresently, the mountain gorilla in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is endangered mainly by poaching and habitat loss. This paper sets out to investigate the possible resolution of poaching involving the local community by using benefit sharing schemes with local communities. Using a bioeconomic model, the paper demonstrates that the current revenue sharing scheme yields suboptimal conservation outcomes. It is, however, shown that a performance-linked benefit sharing scheme in which the Park Agency makes payment to the local community based on the growth of the gorilla stock can achieve socially optimal conservation. This scheme renders poaching effort by the local community, and therefore poaching fines and antipoaching enforcement toward the local community unnecessary. Given the huge financial outlay requirements for the ideal benefit sharing scheme, the Park Agencies in central Africa could reap more financial benefits for use in conservation if they employ an oligopolistic pricing strategy for gorilla tourism
Military Expenditure, Economic Growth and Heterogeneity
No full textThis paper examines the impact of military expenditure on economic growth on a large
balanced panel, using an exogenous growth model and dynamic panel data methods for 106
countries over the period 1988-2010. A major focus of the paper is to consider the
possibility group heterogeneity and non-linearity. Having estimated the model for all of the
countries in the panel and finding that military burden has a negative effect on growth in
the short and long run, the panel is broken down into various groupings based upon a range
of potentially relevant factors and the robustness of the results is evaluated. The factors
considered are different levels of income, conflict experience, natural resources abundance,
openness and aid. The estimates for the different groups are remarkably consistent with
those for the whole panel, providing strong support for the argument that military spending
has adverse effects on growth. There are, however, some intriguing results that suggest that
for certain types of countries military spending has no significant effect on growth