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Enhancing rural road policy: The case for the incorporation of the capabilities approach into rural road appraisal in Africa
No full textInfrastructure provisions, especially rural roads, have been highlighted in a
number of recent studies and reports as an enabling factor for Africa to achieve
‘development’. This paper reviews the current limits of rural road knowledge
and appraisal procedures raising critical issues about what is actually known
about the impact of rural roads and the extent to which current appraisal
methods are able to fully contribute to this debate. An expanded methodology
incorporating the capability approach is advocated to help overcome these
issues. It is argued here that incorporation of the capability approach may help
overcome certain frustrations in our ability to understand the manner in which
rural roads impact upon the lives of people. The suggestion is made that the
capability approach offers a different angle of analysis that could further
contribute to critical questions surrounding the provision of roads, enhancing
appraisal and helping to avoid the creation of further infrastructural ‘white
elephants’ that have plagued Africa. Provision of rural roads is after all quite
expensive and without a valid appraisal mechanism, money spent on some rural
roads may more constructively be utilised elsewhere either on other roads, or on
other sectors
The state of the labour market in South Africa after the first decade of democracy
No full textWhile the political transition to democratic rule in South Africa was smooth and
rapid, the economic transition has been slow and difficult. Nowhere is this
more apparent than in the labour market. Job creation has not matched the
growing labour supply and the unemployment rate continues to rise. This paper
attempts to document and identify the key trends in labour force participation,
unemployment and employment so as to better understand the factors that drive
the performance of the labour market
Health seeking behaviour in northern KwaZulu-Natal
No full textWe examine patterns of health seeking behaviour prior to death among 1282
individuals who lived in the Umkhanyakude District of Northern KwaZulu-
Natal. Information on the health care choices of these individuals, who died
between January 2003 and July 2004, was gathered after their deaths from their
primary care-givers. We examine choices made concerning public and private
medicine, western and traditional medicine, and non-prescribed self-medication.
We find that virtually all adults who were ill prior to death sought treatment
from a Western medical provider, visiting either a public clinic or a private
doctor. In this district, which is predominantly poor, ninety percent of adults
who sought treatment from a public clinic also visited a private doctor. Fifty
percent also sought treatment from a traditional healer, suggesting that
traditional medicine is seen as a complement to, rather than a substitute for,
Western care. Better educated people who were ill for less than a month before
dying were significantly more likely to visit a private doctor, while those least
well educated were more likely to visit a traditional healer. Controlling for
length of illness, better educated and wealthier people sought care from a
greater range of providers, and spent significantly more on their treatment
Democracy, traditional leadership and the international economy in South Africa
No full textThe paper argues that in order to adequately analyse the development of postcolonial
democracy – in this case South Africa – a theoretical model has to take
into account the context within which that democratic experiment finds itself in.
This context is shaped by the international political economy, the circulation of
a democracy discourse at both the level of global and local political culture, and
the history of state-formation. The paper explores what might explain the
resurgence of purportedly ‘traditional’ modes of governance, symbolised by the
‘chief’ across several rural landscapes. It argues that the inability of the state
to affect fundamental changes in the social, political and economic conditions of
the rural hinterlands has created a situation in which local power holders are
able to redefine traditional cultural values. In the process of doing so, these
local power holders both shape and are shaped by a global discourse of what
democracy might be and mean. The paper highlights the debate concerning
notions of “African” forms of democracy, embodied most starkly by some of
Nelson Mandela’s writings, which hold that village level deliberation and
chieftaincy based upon community consensus may be more appropriate models
of democracy than western versions based upon the notions of electoral
contestation. This argument stands in sharp contrast to conventional
approaches to democracy which would suggest that traditional leadership is an
anachronism of lesser developed countries and stands in contrast to western
democratic norms and values
The sensitivity of estimates of post- apartheid changes in South African poverty and inequality to key data imputations
No full textWe 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 the large percentage of individuals and households in both censuses for whom personal income data is missing and to the fact that personal income is collected in income bands rather than as point estimates. First, we use a sequential regression multiple imputation approach to impute missing values for the 2001 census data. Relative to the existing literature, the imputation results lead to estimates of mean income and inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) that are higher and estimates of poverty that are lower. This is true even accounting for the wider confidence intervals that arise from the uncertainty that the imputations bring into the estimation process. Next we go on to assess the influence of dubious zero values by setting them to missing and re-doing the multiple imputation process. This increases the uncertainty associated with the imputation process as reflected in wider confidence intervals on all estimates and only the Gini coefficient is significantly different from the first set of estimated parameters. The final imputation exercise assesses the sensitivity of results to the practice of taking personal incomes recorded in bands and attributing band midpoints to them. We impute an alternative set of intra-band point incomes by replicating the intra-band empirical distribution of personal incomes from a national income and expenditure survey undertaken in the year before each census. Using the empirical distributions increases estimated inequality although the differences are relatively small. We finish our empirical work with a discussion of provincial poverty shares as a policy relevant illustration of the importance of dealing with missing values. Overall our results for 1996 and 2001 confirm the major findings from the existing literature while generating more reliable confidence intervals for the key parameter of interest than are available elsewhere
Financial instruments of the poor: Initial findings from the Financial Diaries Study
No full textA new data set called the Financial Diaries has been produced, based on a
sample of 166 households, drawn from three different areas (Langa, Lugangeni
and Diepsloot), from a range of dwelling types and wealth categories. A unique
methodology was used to create a year-long daily data set of every income,
expense and financial transaction used by these households. Within this sample,
households used, on average, 17 different financial instruments over the course
of the study year. A composite household portfolio, based on all 166
households, has an average of 4 savings instruments, 2 insurance instruments
and 11 credit instruments. Of these financial instruments, for the same
composite household portfolio, 30% are formal and 70% are informal.
Interestingly, it was found that rural households use as many financial
instruments as urban households
Surviving unemployment without state support: Unemployment and household formation in South Africa
No full textWhile in many African countries, open unemployment is largely confined to urban
areas and thus overall rates are quite low, in South Africa (and a few other Southern
African countries), open unemployment rates hover around 30%, with rural
unemployment rates being even higher than that. This occurs despite the near
complete absence of an unemployment insurance system and little labour market
regulation that applies to rural labour markets. This paper examines how
unemployment can persist without support from unemployment compensation.
Analysing household surveys from 1993, 1995, and 1998, we find that the household
formation response of the unemployed is the critical way in which the unemployed
assure access to resources. In particular, unemployment delays the setting up of an
individual household by young persons, in some cases by decades. It also leads to
the dissolution of existing households and a return of constituent members to parents
and other relatives and friends. Access to state transfers (in particular, noncontributory
old age pensions) increases the likelihood of attracting unemployed
persons to a household. Some unemployed do not benefit from this safety net, and the
presence of unemployed members pulls many households supporting them into
poverty. We also show that the household formation response draw some of the
unemployed away from employment opportunities, and thus lowers their employment
prospects
The school day in South Africa
No full textWe investigate the time allocation decisions by South African learners using the South African Time Use Survey. We show that punctuality appears to be a problem with around 20% of all learners seeming to arrive late. Punctuality and absenteeism seem to be problems disproportionately among poor learners. Overall time devoted to schooling and homework does not show a consistent income gradient. Poor learners, however, spend considerable time each day on chores. The distribution of this additional work falls disproportionately on girls. Some of the findings can be easily explained in terms of a simple human capital production framework, but some of the social constraints seem to require a broader framework in which choices by some individuals create externalities for others
Asset-based versus money metric poverty indices in South Africa: An assessment using the chronic poverty research centre RSA 2002 survey
No full textUsing data from a detailed chronic poverty survey of three South African communities, this paper compares the correlations between traditional (i.e. income and expenditure) and wealth-based measures of poverty in ranking households as poor as well as their ability to explain additional qualitative measures of persistent poverty such as household hunger. We find significant locational differences in terms of the composition of household wealth measures and this complicates the derivation of appropriate wealth indices. Traditional money-metric measures of poverty that abstract from location appear to explain short-term measures of deprivation like household hunger relatively well, and consistently capture the bottom and top deciles of the distribution. On their own, wealth-based measures appear less suited to explaining household hunger, suggesting that liquid based measures for short-term indicators are more appropriate
Testing for a common latent variable in a linear regression: Or how to "fix" a bad variable by adding multiple proxies for it
No full textWe analyse models in which additional “controls” or proxies are included in a regression. This might
occur intentionally if there is significant measurement error in a key regressor or if a key variable is not
measured at all. We develop a test of the hypothesis that a subset of the regressors are all proxying for
the same latent variable and we show how an estimate of the structural coefficient might be obtained
more efficiently than is available in the current literature.
We apply the procedure to the determinants of sleep among young South Africans. We show that the
income variable in the time use survey is badly measured. Nevertheless the measured impact of income
on sleep is significant and amounts to 35 minutes per day between children with the median income and
those in the topmost income bracket. Including a variety of asset proxies increases the estimated size
of the coefficient enormously. The specification tests indicate that some of the asset proxies, however,
have independent effects. Access to electricity, in particular, is not simply proxying for income. Instead
it seems to be capturing access to various forms of entertainment, such as television. Even when this
independent effect is properly accounted for, the size of the income coefficient is still 40% to 100% larger than in the specifications without the proxies