921 research outputs found
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Employer of Last Resort? South Africas Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP)
No full textSouth Africas largest active labour market intervention (ALMP) is the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP). Its first five-year phase has been completed and a second phase, more ambitious by far than its predecessor, has commenced. Critical analysis suggests that contrary to the hype, the programme has thus far made little lasting impact on the poverty and unemployment it is supposed to address. The analysis is in four parts: the first is an exploration of the background to the EPWP, in its role as South Africas largest active labour market policy; the second presents an examination of aspects of the performance of EPWP Phase 1, looking in particular at target vs. actual numbers of job opportunities and training days. This section also looks briefly at the EPWPs proposed monitoring and evaluation (M&E) programme, before undertaking a more detailed consideration of the published information available on the training/employment nexus. The section ends with a glance at weaknesses in one of the surveys (the Labour Force Surveys, LFSs) put forward as data sources for evaluating the EPWP during Phase1; the third considers aspects of the vast increases in the scope of EPWP from Phase 1 to Phase 2, of the way in which these have been communicated, and of the way in which they are to be funded, while fourth the looks at the possible contribution that this second phase could/may make to the goal of halving unemployment by 2014. This part of the paper reproduces a set of scenarios produced by the National Treasury and published in the Budget Review 2010. These point to the extreme unlikelihood of the unemployment halving goal being attained. The paper ends with a set of recommendations, many relating to the production and distribution of knowledge about the EPWP
Inheriting the Future: Intergenerational Persistence of Educational status in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
No full textThis paper examines the changes in the educational attainment of three successive generations in South Africa: grandparents, parents and children. Many of the results accord with widely known facts, such as the educational penalty faced by individuals who are African or who live in rural areas or in female-headed households. Similarly, the larger impact of mothers education on child outcomes relative to fathers education accords with previous work, although it is interesting that this gender difference is only sizeable and significant for relationships between the second and third generation. Key findings in this paper include the fact that persistence has increased with subsequent generations
Inequality Traps in South Africa: An overview and research agenda
No full textThere has been considerable effort in ascertaining with confidence the trends in income inequality in South Africa. South Africa has traditionally been among the most unequal countries in the world and continues to be so. Surprisingly, levels of inequality have not decreased despite the transition to democratic rule in the 1990s; if any, they seem to have increased. There has also been considerable work on the proximate causes of these highlevels of inequality on the basis of inequality decompositions (See Leibbrandt, Levinsohn and McCrary 2010, Leibbrandt. Woolard, Finn and Argent 2010, and Bhorat et al. 2009 for recent analyses). However, much less is known about the underlying causes of this high level of inequality and of its persistence
Health outcomes for children born to teen mothers in Cape Town, South Africa
No full textThis paper analyzes the effect of being born to a teen mother on child health outcomes in South Africa using propensity score reweighting. Exploiting the longitudinal nature of the Cape Area Panel Study, we estimate the probability of being a teen mother conditional on pre-childbirth characteristics. We use this score to construct a weighted counterfactual group of children born to mothers over nineteen whose pre-childbirth characteristics are very similar to the teen mother sample except for their age at the birth of their first child. Our reweighted regressions indicate that being born to a teen mother has some significant adverse effects on child health, especially among Coloured children. In particular, children born to teens are more likely to be underweight at birth and to be stunted with the negative effect being double the size for Coloureds than Africans. No negative impact of teenage childbearing is found on head circumference at birth or the incidence of incomplete first year immunizations. These results remain robust even when we simulate influential unobservable effects in both the reweighting equation and the outcome equation
What Drives Corruption? Evidence from North African Firms
No full textThis paper empirically analyzes the main microeconomic determinants of two
forms of corruption supply, administrative corruption and state capture, by
Maghrebi firms. This study is based on a new database of nearly 600 Algerian,
Moroccan and Tunisian firms. I show that tax evasion is a major factor in
the engagement of firms in administrative corruption. The latter increases with
the share of sales hidden by the firm as long as it is below half of total sales, and
slightly decreases thereafter. State capture is fostered by a failing enforcement
of property and contract rights. Interestingly, less competitive firms appear to
engage more in both forms of corruption than the most dynamic ones. After assessing
the robustness of my empirical results, I draw a comparison of the factors of corruption in North Africa, Uganda and transition countries
The fate of Zimbabwe's children: Insights from changes in nutrition outcomes, 1999-2006
No full textThe economic situation in Zimbabwe deteriorated significantly between 2000 and 2009. However, little empirical effort has been directed towards analysing changes in outcomes at micro levels during this challenging period. This paper therefore investigates changes in welfare during this period, with specific reference to child health outcomes. In addition to using height and weight for age as proxies for welfare, the analysis further overcomes the absence of consumption data expenditure by using a food variety score to proxy for access to food and an asset index based on principal component analysis to provide an alternative for economic ranking. Results from a comparative analysis of the 1999 and 2005/6 DHS data show that average height and weight for age z-scores for children aged 5 years or under worsened by 19% and 16% respectively while food consumption declined by 34%. These declines were across the entire wealth distribution but were more pronounced among children in middle quartile and the poorest households, but least for the rich. Multivariate regressions of height and weight for age show that a large part of their decline between 1999 and 2005/06 is explained by the deterioration in access to food over this period. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions show that deterioration in access to food explains half the overall decline in mean height for age
Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status
No full textWe present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial endowments were earned, under the other they were randomly assigned. The first experiment was conducted in Oxford, United Kingdom, the second in Cape Town, South Africa. In both locations we found that relatively well-off individuals make allocations to others that reflect those others initial endowments more when those endowments were earned rather than random; among relatively poor individuals this was not the case
The weight of success: The body mass index and economic well-being in South Africa
No full textWe show that body mass increases with economics resources among most South Africans, although not all. Among Black South Africans the relationship is non-decreasing over virtually the entire range of incomes/wealth. Furthermore in this groupd other measures of success (e.g. employment and education) are also associated with increases in body mass. This is true both in 1998 (the Demographic and Health Survey) and 2008 (National Income Dynamics Survey). This suggests the body mass can be used as a crude measure of wellbeing. Used in this way it suggests that unemployment is involuntary. This is true even if we control for household fixed effects.
This is joint SALDRU/DataFirst Working Paper as part of the Mellon Data Quality Project
Educational inheritance and the distribution of occupations: Evidence from South Africa
No full textWe analyse the role of educational opportunity in shaping inequality in the distribution of occupations in the long-run. We start by modelling the probability that a child occupies the same or a different rung on the occupational ladder as her parents controlling for both the educational attainment of the child, as well as the level of educational opportunity of the child. These conditional probabilities are then used to construct separate transition matrices by level of educational opportunity, race and gender, which in turn are used to the compute the steady-state distribution of occupations. Finally, we use the timing of political events in the history of the struggle to end Apartheid to devise an identification strategy that permits a causal interpretation of the role of educational opportunity. We find evidence that educational opportunity has a strong conditioning effect on the distribution of occupations in steady state. In particular, African female children who inherit the same level of educational opportunity as their parents are 9% more likely to be in the bottom of the occupation distribution in steady-state, than the observed rate for the population at large, whereas they would face a 4% lower probability if they were exposed to better educational opportunities
Ethnolinguistic Diversity and the Provision of Public Goods: Experimental Evidence from South Africa
No full textThis paper utilises techniques in experimental economics to investigate the impact of racial identity on the provision of public goods. A large sample of Black and White undergraduate University students were recruited to participate in public goods games, where the racial composition of the groups was varied to include All White groups, All Black groups and mixed race groups (comprising Black and White students). The results show that contrary to predictions from social identity theory, racial homogeneity in a group does not uniformly predict higher contributions to the public pool. Rather, it would appear that observable racial identity may convey information about extensive heterogeneity as opposed to homogeneity, especially where race is highly correlated with diversity in other dimensions, such as ethnolinguistic diversity. In accordance with the established macroeconometric literature on the provision of public goods, the results presented in this study show that contributions to the public good are indeed increasing in the level of trust in a group, and declining in the extent of ethnolinguistic diversity and socio-economic need in the group. Moreover, while communication has a large and significant effect on contributions to the public pool, patterns of communication are a ected by the racial composition of the group, with Black students appearing to be more responsive to communications made by White colleagues as opposed to Black colleagues. Hence, communication is not effective at sustaining co-operation in racially homogenous Black groups, possibly because communication in these groups allows participants to verify the greater diversity on other dimensions amongst group members