Social Indicators Research

, Volume 86, Issue 3, pp 433–452 | Cite as

The Non-Economic Quality of Life on a Sub-National Level in South Africa

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Abstract

Most research on the non-economic quality of life have been (a) on a national level or performed on cross-country comparisons, and/or (b) used subjective indicators to measure how people perceive their non-economic quality of life. In this paper, our main contribution is to construct objective indicators of the non-economic quality of life for 354 sub-national magisterial districts in South Africa. We also compare changes in these indicators over time, and consider methodological issues in the construction of objective indicators of non-economic quality of life. We find that although income does matter for the overall quality of life, non-income components of the quality of life can make an important difference. We find a number of places with low incomes that have been able to achieve higher than expected outcomes in terms of the non-economic quality of life, and that some of the relative income poor areas have improved their non-economic ranking between 1996 and 2004. We also find that the geographical/environmental quality of life in South Africa is better in non-urban areas, where fewer of the country’s population is residing. Significant improvements in the overall quality of life may be achieved through improvements in the urban natural environment.

Keywords

Quality of life Non-economic measures Sub-national inequality Human development index South Africa 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.School of EconomicsNorth-West UniversityPotchefstroomSouth Africa
  2. 2.World Institute for Development Economics ResearchUnited Nations UniversityHelsinkiFinland
  3. 3.WorkWell, Research Unit for People, Policy and PerformanceNorth-West UniversityPotchefstroomSouth Africa

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