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The labour market for minibus taxi drivers in South Africa
No full textIn this paper, we provide the first detailed description of the labour market for taxi drivers in South Africa and investigate the extent to which wages in this market are set competitively. To do this we analyse survey data on both drivers and owners of minibus taxis. We find both direct and indirect indications that this market is not competitive, despite the low skill requirements and bargaining power of taxi drivers in an economy characterised by high unemployment, which would appear to be characteristics of a competitive labour market.This paper is based on Lauren Antrobus’s honours long paper, written as a student in the School of Economics, University of Cape Town. It has been substantially revised and we acknowledge funding from a REDI incentive grant that helped make these revisions possible. Although the main analysis in the paper is based on survey data, some of the insights come from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the taxi industry by Andrew Kerr between 2013 and 2016. In the interests of transparency: Andrew Kerr is also the owner of the website taximap.co.za, which provides information to commuters who wish to use minibus taxis
Recovery from stunting in early childhood and subsequent schooling outcomes: Evidence from NIDS Waves 1-5
No full textThis paper explores the association between catch-up growth in early childhood and subsequent educational outcomes, using data from the first five waves of NIDS conducted between 2008 and 2017. While an extensive literature documents the negative effects of early stunting (a commonly-used marker of undernutrition) on children’s developmental potential, there is far less evidence on whether a recovery from stunting in early childhood - or ‘catch-up growth’ - helps to mitigate the negative effects of early growth retardation. This study shows that, on average, children who recovered from stunting between 2 and 4/5 years of age still go on to complete fewer years of schooling compared to their non-stunted counterparts. This seems to be driven in large part by a slower progression through the schooling system once enrolled. However, there also appear to be heterogeneous effects depending on the extent of recovery: The small proportion of children who recovered such that their height fell within the ‘normal’ range for their age at follow-up, exhibit similar educational outcomes to the non-stunted group. These results have important implications for the timing of nutritional investments in the early childhood period.Funding for this research from the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation is
gratefully acknowledged
Developing a Multidimensional Youth Employability Index to unpack vulnerabilities in the lived realities of youth in Post-apartheid South Africa
No full textEmployability, understood as the ability to gain, sustain, and move on in employment, depends on and shapes circumstances in a young person’s lifeworld. In a Post-apartheid South Africa individual attributes as well as vulnerabilities in the young person’s home and neighbourhood all impact on labour outcomes. We develop a multidimensional youth employability index to capture this complexity following the Alkire and Foster method. We use the Census 2011 data. The results show that various forms of networks in the youth’s household and neighbourhood make a stronger contribution to their employability than do the individual’s attributes such as education, despite the latter’s prominence in the employability literature. There is a strong geographical component to employability and results are highly differentiated across municipalities. It matters greatly whether youth are in formal or informal work, have become discouraged or are unemployed and looking for a job when it comes to being employability deprived. However, large proportions of employed youth are employability deprived and lived realities at the lower end of the labour market are very similar with or without a job. Our results therefore demonstrate the usefulness of an expanded view on youth employability as it is able to unpack hardships that remain masked when using “employment” as a single indicator for youth’s socio-economic inclusion into the labour market.The research was funded by Anthropology of Human Security in Africa. ANTHUSIA is a multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa conducted by a consortium of four universities in Aarhus (Denmark), Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Leuven (Belgium) and Oslo (Norway). It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 764546.
This work forms part of Evelien Storme’s doctoral research and is the quantitative tier of a mixed method study looking into youth and livelihood in South Africa.
The paper is a product of interdisciplinary collaboration between the Institute of Anthropology in Africa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium and the Southern African Labour and Development Unit at the School of Economics of the University of Cape Town.
We’re thankful to Associate Professor in Human Security Christian B.N. Gade for helpful feedback and to Dr Joanna Ryan for research assistance
Review of Youth Labour Market Research
No full textThis policy brief provides an overview of the evidence on the precarious connection between youth and the labour market in South Africa. Drawing on almost 10 years of data collected by the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS), the brief highlights evidence on labour market exclusion among many young people and vulnerability even among those who are employed, before considering the consequences of young people's staggered transitions from school to work. The evidence collected by NIDS provides government and civil society with the opportunity to assess the implementation of existing policies and the well-being of yout
Networks, start-up capital and women’s entrepreneurial performance in Africa: Evidence from Eswatini
No full textThis paper analyzes the role of networks in the access of female entrepreneurs to start-up capital and firm performance in Eswatini, a country with one of the highest female unemployment rates in Africa. The paper first shows that higher initial capital is associated with better sales performance for both men and women entrepreneurs. Women entrepreneurs start their firms with smaller start-up capital than men and are more likely to fund it from their own sources, which reduces the size of their firm and sales level. However, women with higher education start their firms with more capital than their less educated counterparts. Moreover, women who receive support from professional networks have higher initial capital, while those trained in financial literacy more often access external funding sources, including through their networks
Financial literacy in South Africa
No full textWe analyse measures of financial literacy, included in the NIDS survey for the first time in Wave 5. South Africa follows patterns found in other countries. Less educated and low income respondents display low levels of financial literacy. Most countries have large gender gaps in financial literacy while the gender gap is absent in South Africa. Controlling for a number of socio-demographic variables, financial literacy is positively related to ownership of a pension and of mutual funds, stocks, or shares.Funding for this research from the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation is gratefully
acknowledged
Household Balance Sheets in South Africa
No full textThis paper evaluates the composition of household portfolios including assets, liabilities and net worth in the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) wave 5 (SALDRU, 2018). The inclusion of a top up sample of 1005 households made the sample more representative of the South African population – particularly the higher end of the wealth distribution, which was previously under-represented because of panel attrition between Waves 1-4. This resulted in an increase in the estimates of real total household assets and liabilities (after the removal of outliers), bringing the distribution closer to the macroeconomic household balance sheet estimates of assets and liabilities provided by the SA Reserve Bank (SARB), which implies that the top-up sample also improved the external validity of the wealth data. We find that household balance sheets are dominated by real estate and vehicular assets and debts, with notable exceptions in different covariate domains. In terms of inequality between waves 4 and 5 of NIDS, there has been a slight decrease in the Gini coefficient on net-worth despite the top-up sample, but an increase in the Gini coefficient on financial assets. The overall conclusion of the paper is that the NIDS Wave 5 wealth module is fit for purpose and researchers can conduct a wide range of analyses with the data, but researchers still need to conduct their own outlier detection checks before commencing analyses.Funding for this research from the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation is gratefully
acknowledged
Returns to English skills in the South African labour market
No full textWhile there are 11 official languages in South Africa, English remains the dominant language in the country’s economic and political sphere. Internationally, there is a large body of research providing evidence that proficiency in the country’s dominant language is associated with high labour market returns in terms of earnings and employment. However, the literature in this area of research is considerably lacking in South Africa. This paper aims to extend this literature by analysing the effect of English proficiency on wages and employment probabilities amongst a nationally representative sample of working-aged males in the country. The analysis makes use of Waves 1-5 of the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) survey, which is the first survey in South Africa to collect data on English proficiency. Several econometric techniques are employed in an attempt to deal with measurement error and endogeneity which can lead to biased estimates of the proficiency effect in the wage and employment models, including the use of fitted values, instrumental variables, matching on household and spouse characteristics, district fixed effects, and the Heckman selection technique. It is found that, in the absence of these methods, both the wage and employment estimates are biased downwards – in other words, the bias from measurement error dominates the bias due to endogeneity overall. The results provide strong evidence of positive effects of English language proficiency on both employment probabilities and wages. Specifically, a one unit increase in the fitted value of proficiency is associated with a 23-25 percentage point increase in the probability of employment, and a wage premium of 33 percent
Changes in the care burden over the transition to adulthood
No full textThis study uses two characteristics of NIDS that are not found in other national datasets in South Africa to explore the gendered changes in respect of care work that occur as older teenagers enter adulthood. These characteristics are, firstly, the inclusion of a question on the main caregiver for each child under 15 years of age and the longitudinal nature of the study which allows analysis to compare the situation of an individual at two different points in their life. The study explores changes in the care burden of young women and men who are aged between 15 and 19 (inclusive) in the 2008 NIDS survey and nine years older (24-28) in the 2017 NIDS survey between these two dates. It does so by constructing a care burden index for each of these years for all individuals with records for both dates. The paper first explores separately for each time period to what extent there are gender differences in the care burden as measured by the care index, using descriptive statistics. This is followed by regression analysis to determine which factors are associated with larger increases in the care burden at the endpoint.Funding for this research from the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation is gratefully
acknowledged
Snakes and ladders and loaded dice: Poverty dynamics and inequality in South Africa between 2008-2017
No full textIn developing country contexts, poverty analysis is most often undertaken using cross-sectional survey data. If this data is representative at a certain geographical level (local, regional or national), it can give an indication of the extent, depth, severity, and correlates of poverty in a place, at a single point in time. However, poverty is experienced not only at a point in time, but also over time. Poverty is not a static, timeless state – it is a dynamic and evolving phenomenon, with a past and a future (Calvo and Dercon, 2009). That is, households move into and out of poverty over time, remain trapped in poverty, or succeed in keeping their heads above water. In the world of risk and uncertainty in which poverty is lived (Dercon, 2006), poverty is experienced as a game of snakes and ladders. However, going beyond the element of chance, in this game factors that relate to the parental background or geographic location of the household, for example, have loaded the dice in favour of some individuals compared to others. In this sense, cross-sectional analyses remain blind to both the “snakes” that lead households or individuals to fall into poverty and the “ladders” which facilitate poverty escapes, as well as to the contextual factors that condition these transitions. Particularly with regard to the latter, it is important to note that the experience of poverty itself may affect not only the opportunities available to a household, but also its economic choices. By missing this dynamic element, a cross-sectional perspective is fundamentally limited in understanding the nature and determinants of poverty.Funding for this research from the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation is
gratefully acknowledged