IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/deveza/v38y2021i6p896-918.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Social well-being inequality in Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Stephanié Rossouw
  • Talita Greyling

Abstract

In this paper, we construct a composite social well-being index to investigate disparities between 30 African countries. We do this because previous inequality studies relied on income measures; however, when it comes to Africa, specifically, income is not an adequate measure to capture well-being. Furthermore, we apply the recentered influence function (RIF) method to regress the variance of social well-being on likely influencing factors. Lastly, we use the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique to investigate the gap between countries with higher, and those with lower levels of social well-being. The results indicate that there are high levels of inequality; however, the inequality in social well-being is less stark than in income. Factors that are significantly related to inequality are employment, gender equality, exports, CO2 emissions, population density, public protests, capital investment, and internet access. The gap that exists between higher and lower social well-being countries is mainly due to the endowment effect.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephanié Rossouw & Talita Greyling, 2021. "Social well-being inequality in Africa," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(6), pages 896-918, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:38:y:2021:i:6:p:896-918
    DOI: 10.1080/0376835X.2020.1828830
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0376835X.2020.1828830
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/0376835X.2020.1828830?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:deveza:v:38:y:2021:i:6:p:896-918. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CDSA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.