Abstract
This study examines the enduring spatial and racial dimensions of poverty and deprivation in South Africa to assess the progress made by the post-apartheid society and state. A multi-dimensional approach is required to assess progress because it can reflect the reduction in deprivation attributable to the improved affordability and expanded coverage of government services. While there has been previous studies tracking poverty trends over segments of the post-apartheid period, no previous work has considered multi-dimensional deprivation over the two decades following the official fall of apartheid. We adopt the Total Fuzzy and Relative (TFR) approach proposed by Cheli and Lemmi (Econ Notes 24(1):115–134, 1995) to derive a poverty index with nine dimensions of deprivation, including education, employment, dwelling type, overcrowding, access to electricity, water, telephone, sanitation and refuse collection. Our analysis shows that there has been a significant improvement in deprivation levels between 1996 and 2011, but it also finds that geography and race continue to play an important role in explaining patterns of deprivation.
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Notes
During the apartheid period government expenditure per capita for residents of homelands was higher than for black South Africans residing elsewhere in South Africa, but dwarfed by spending per capita on white South Africans (Van der Berg and Moses 2012).
Household surveys and censuses ask respondents to self-identify their race as black, coloured, white or Indian. The coloured category refers to an extremely diverse group of people whose mixed heritage attests to decades of intimate contact amongst a range of ethnic groups (Gibson 2015). Surveys also often provide an “other” category, but it is rarely used. Although collecting information on race is not uncontroversial, there is broad acceptance that such information is required to assess the performance of the post-apartheid state.
The estimates in this paragraph are our own.
Filippone et al. (2001) identify two advantages of choosing a logarithmic functional form in this case: it assigns a value of 0 to those dimensions where the whole population falls into the lowest category, i.e., everyone is deprived, and avoids giving too much importance to extremely rare poverty indicators. Note that \(w_{j}\) is not defined when \(\overline{\delta } (x_{j} ) = 0\), i.e., when no person is deprived or poor in dimension Xj. If everybody is non-poor in dimension X j , then dimension X j makes no significant contribution to a study of poverty and should, therefore, not be included.
There are concerns that censuses may not capture the composition and size of the population completely accurately. For instance, post-enumeration surveys revealed an undercount of just over 10 % in 1996, and just over 20 % in 2001, which have been adjusted in the sample weights. Even after these adjustments, however, demographers have noted some inconsistencies between the censuses, but this should not greatly affect the results of this analysis.
Comparing census estimates of unemployment to labour forces survey estimates, we find that the census tends to overestimate unemployment, which most likely relates to the lack of prompts and follow-up questions asked to survey respondents. It is, however, encouraging to see that the Census/Community Surveys track trends in unemployment observed in the labour force surveys.
Employing alternative approaches for estimating the education and labour market dimensions using the highest educational attainment and an indicator capturing whether there is any employed household member, there are some reallocations across deciles, but it is encouraging to see that the geographical inequalities are sufficiently stark that the provincial rank is not affected.
South Africa has adopted a narrow definition of unemployment. The difference between the narrow and the broad definition is due to the prevalence of discouraged work seekers, i.e., respondents who say that they want work, but who have not actively sought work over the past 4 weeks. According to the narrow definition, such discouraged workers are classified as not being economically active. In contrast, the broad definition would include them as unemployed and part of the labour force. After the revision of the labour market status derivation methodology in 2008 (with the introduction of QLFS), the discouraged work seekers definition has changed and it is therefore difficult to construct comparable estimates of broad unemployment; thus our deprivation index uses the narrow definition of unemployment.
Western Cape and Gauteng are generally described as more affluent, urban and have a lower share of black South Africans. (“Appendix” Tables 7 and 8 provide more detail.) The stark differences in employment levels and affluence generate a steady stream of internal migration flows of work seekers to the urban provinces. “Appendix” Table 9 shows that Gauteng and Western Cape receive 45 and 12 % respectively of all internal migrants.
Looking at smaller geographical units (district councils) this observation remains true. The analysis compares changes in deprivation levels between 2011 and 2001 due to changes in the district councils that occurred between 1996 and 2001, thus impeding comparability. The analysis is not shown here, but is available upon request from the authors.
There is a concern that the index may be over-sensitive to rural poverty, due to the prominence of service delivery variables in the index and the lack of variables that can capture access to own produce and other rural livelihood. However, the index does capture the most important dimensions of deprivation and is thus a useful tool in tracking post-apartheid progress, particularly in service delivery.
Decreases in deprivation are statistically significant at each time period and for each vigintile (5 % quantile), except the last vigintile (95th percentile).
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Appendix
Appendix
See Figs. 5 and 6 and Tables 7, 8, 9 and 10.
Cumulative distribution of deprivation by province for blacks, 2011
Cumulative distribution of deprivation by province for whites, 2011
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Burger, R., van der Berg, S., van der Walt, S. et al. The Long Walk: Considering the Enduring Spatial and Racial Dimensions of Deprivation Two Decades After the Fall of Apartheid. Soc Indic Res 130, 1101–1123 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1237-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1237-1