SAGA Progress Report
October, 2003

• Labor markets in South Africa.
  
  DPRU produced its highly successful "Fighting Poverty" report with AERC support three years ago. SAGA helped DPRU prepare a reapplication for a second stage of support focusing on labor markets. This application has been successful. Although not financed by SAGA, this work complements the work being financed by SAGA on poverty and labor markets in South Africa.
  
  
• The evolution of poverty in South Africa in the-post Apartheid era.
  
  In our initial discussions, we developed a proposal for using the Income/Expenditure Household Survey (IES) 1995 and IES 2000 to give a picture of how poverty evolved in South Africa in the first five years after the fall of Apartheid. However, there have been growing doubts about the quality of IES 2000. A meeting attended by DPRU at the Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR) confirmed that the IES 2000 data is unreliable and unusable in its current form, due to various problems. We therefore have no reliable income or expenditure data and, as a result, parts of the original proposal as it stands are not workable.
  
  The proposed way forward for this project is to use other datasets for the comparison. As the baseline, we can still use the October Household Survey (OHS) 1995 and the Census 1996 10% sample, and for comparison, the various Labor Force Surveys (LFS) of 2000, 2001, and 2002, as well as the Census 2001 10% sample once it becomes available. The LFSs have a certain section, of which the questions change from survey to survey. These questions match with parts of the OHS 1995, allowing for comparison. Spatial analyses may be carried out on the two 10% Census samples. No direct income/expenditure comparisons will be carried out.
  
  For the period 1995-2002, therefore, these are some of the issues that can be analyzed:
  
  
  • Labor market trends (relatively unaffected by problems):
    • Employment, unemployment, underemployment, labor absorption, sectoral and occupational distributions, formal/informal sector
    • Sensitivity to gender, age, race, education, location.
  • Labor Markets and Vulnerability:
    • Concentrations of unemployed across deciles
    • Access to income by income type of the unemployed
    • Characteristics of unemployed (including education/literacy)
  • Poverty correlates:
    • Concentrations of elderly/children across deciles (including dependency ratios)
    • Access to income by income type across deciles
    • Access to state welfare structures (take-up, grant types) across deciles
    • Access to health services, modern water and electricity networks
    • Average years of education
    • Housing: type of dwelling, construction materials, sanitation, size
      
      
• Education and poverty
  
  Although the two projects discussed above touch on education, given its importance in South Africa, DPRU proposed a study focusing specifically on education, exploiting specific data sets that have not been extensively used before. SAGA helped DPRU develop a proposal, "Human Capital Outcomes in South Africa: The Role of Primary and Secondary School Institutions." This proposal has been submitted to SISERA, and we are awaiting the outcome of that submission.
  
  
• Papers on poverty and policy
  
  We are planning to commission a number of papers in various aspects of poverty and policy in South Africa. After discussions with USAID-South Africa, the following preliminary list has been identified:
  
  

1. An assessment of IES 2000
2. Evolution of poverty and inequality, 1995-2000
3. Evolution of poverty and inequality and labor markets using the 1995 and 2002 LFS/OHS
4. Education and poverty
5. Inflation and the Poor
6. Is Public Expenditure Pro-poor?
7. Openness, Trade and Poverty.
8. Exchange Rate Volatility and poverty
9. The earner/non-earner composition of poor and non-poor households, with implications for the impact of minimum wages on unemployment and poverty.
10. HIV/Aids and Poverty using the 1998 DHS.
11. Crime and poverty
12. Poverty Maps for South Africa.

• Support for DPRU conference on poverty and policy in South Africa, October 2004.
  
  We have begun planning for a major conference on poverty and policy in South Africa, to be organized by DPRU in October, 2004. Some of the papers prepared for the project noted above will be presented at the conference, but the conference will have a wider catchment of scholars from inside and outside South Africa. It will raise DPRU’s profile as South Africa’s premier institution for poverty analysis.
  
  
• Outreach support.
  
  Ravi Kanbur has been involved in a number of outreach activities at the request of USAID-South Africa and DPRU. He has addressed Parliamentarians on the issue of globalization and poverty, made presentations to South Africa Treasury staff on a range of issues, and has become a peer reviewer for the Fiscal and Finance Commission for their next report to Parliament. The research collaboration with DPRU has complemented well the training course on poverty analysis that Cornell and DPRU held in Cape Town for staff from Historically Disadvantaged Universities.
  
  

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