IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ctw/wpaper/07123.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Sticking to the Facts: Official and Unofficial Stories about Poverty and Unemployment in South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Charles Meth

    (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

Abstract

The major cause of poverty is unemployment. This paper looks at aspects of the way government responds to claims that are made, chiefly by academics, about poverty and unemployment. Official statistics on poverty and unemployment enjoy little favour among senior politicians and civil servants. ‘Unofficial’ poverty and unemployment statistics, by contrast, are seized upon with enthusiasm if they contradict the gloomy picture created by numbers that suggest (with monotonous regularity) that improvements in the lives of the poor are not happening fast enough. The first part of the paper explores possible explanations of government’s extreme sensitivity to criticism. The second part of the paper looks at an old chestnut, the repeated claim by government that the severity of the unemployment problem has (in part?) to do with the ‘fact’ that the number of economically active people has grown faster than the number of working age people. The third part of the paper looks briefly at the van der Berg et al (2005) poverty reduction estimates for the period 2000-2004 (they have the headcount falling from 18.5 to 15.4 million), before reproducing my estimates for the period 2001-2004 (the headcount falls from about 19.5 to somewhere in the region of 18 million. Suggestions are offered for the proper academic conduct upon releasing contentious results into a highly-charged political debate.

Suggested Citation

  • Charles Meth, 2007. "Sticking to the Facts: Official and Unofficial Stories about Poverty and Unemployment in South Africa," Working Papers 07123, University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit.
  • Handle: RePEc:ctw:wpaper:07123
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7270
    File Function: First version, 2007
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Angus Deaton, 2005. "Measuring Poverty in a Growing World (or Measuring Growth in a Poor World)," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 87(1), pages 1-19, February.
    2. Lal, Deepak & Myint, H., 1998. "The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth: A Comparative Study," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198294320.
    3. Rulof Burger & Derek Yu, 2006. "Wage trends in post-apartheid South Africa: Constructing an earnings series from household survey data," Working Papers 10/2006, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    4. Martin Ravallion, 2003. "Measuring Aggregate Welfare in Developing Countries: How Well Do National Accounts and Surveys Agree?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 85(3), pages 645-652, August.
    5. Geeta G. Kingdon & John B. Knight, 2000. "Are searching and non-searching unemployment distinct states when unemployment is high? The case of South Africa," CSAE Working Paper Series 2000-02, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    6. Ravi Kanbur, 2004. "Growth, Inequality And Poverty: Some Hard Questions," Working Papers 157, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.
    7. Charles Meth, 2004. "Half Measures: The ANC's Unemployment and Poverty Reduction Goals," Working Papers 04089, University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Charles Meth, 2007. "Flogging a dead horse: Attempts by van der Berg et al to measure changes in poverty and inequality," SALDRU Working Papers 9, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    2. Frederick C.v.N. Fourie, 2011. "The South African unemployment debate: three worlds, three discourses?," SALDRU Working Papers 63, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Anna McCord, 2004. "Public works: Policy expectations and programme realities," SALDRU/CSSR Working Papers 079, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    2. Charles Meth, 2006. "What was the poverty headcount in 2004 and how does it compare to recent estimates by van der Berg et al?," SALDRU Working Papers 1, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    3. David Lam & Murray Leibbrandt & Cecil Mlatsheni, 2008. "Education and Youth Unemployment in South Africa," SALDRU Working Papers 22, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    4. Benhura, Miracle, 2007. "Determinants of South African Women’s Labour Force Participation, 1995–2004," IZA Discussion Papers 3119, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Aysit Tansel & H. Mehmet Taşçı, 2010. "Hazard Analysis of Unemployment Duration by Gender in a Developing Country: The Case of Turkey," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 24(4), pages 501-530, December.
    6. Dang, Hai-Anh H. & Serajuddin, Umar, 2020. "Tracking the sustainable development goals: Emerging measurement challenges and further reflections," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    7. Gaurav Datt & Martin Ravallion & Rinku Murgai, 2020. "Poverty and Growth in India over Six Decades," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(1), pages 4-27, January.
    8. Pieter Serneels, 2004. "The Nature of Unemployment in Urban Ethiopia," CSAE Working Paper Series 2004-01, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    9. Patrick Duff & David Fryer, 2005. "Market Failure, Human Capital, and Job Search Dynamics in South Africa: The Case of Duncan Village," Working Papers 05098, University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit.
    10. Facundo Alvaredo & Mauricio de Rosa & Ignacio Flores & Marc Morgan, 2022. "The Inequality (or the Growth) we Measure: Data Gaps and the Distribution of Incomes," Working Papers halshs-03693223, HAL.
    11. François Bourguignon, 2015. "Appraising income inequality databases in Latin America," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 13(4), pages 557-578, December.
    12. Kibrom A Abay & Nishant Yonzan & Sikandra Kurdi & Kibrom Tafere, 2023. "Revisiting Poverty Trends and the Role of Social Protection Systems in Africa during the COVID-19 Pandemic," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 32(Supplemen), pages 44-68.
    13. Grimm, Michael & Harttgen, Kenneth & Klasen, Stephan & Misselhorn, Mark, 2008. "A Human Development Index by Income Groups," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(12), pages 2527-2546, December.
    14. Francis Menjo Baye, 2013. "Household Economic Well‐being: Response to Micro‐Credit Access in Cameroon," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 25(4), pages 447-467, December.
    15. Channing Arndt & Kristi Mahrt, 2017. "Is inequality underestimated in Mozambique? Accounting for underreported consumption," WIDER Working Paper Series 153, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    16. Shaohua Chen & Martin Ravallion, 2010. "The Developing World is Poorer than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(4), pages 1577-1625.
    17. Christoph Lakner & Daniel Gerszon Mahler & Mario Negre & Espen Beer Prydz, 2022. "How much does reducing inequality matter for global poverty?," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 20(3), pages 559-585, September.
    18. Mthuli Ncube & Zuzana Brixiova & Zorobabel Bicaba, 2014. "Can Dreams Come True? Eliminating Extreme Poverty In Africa By 2030," William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series wp1076, William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan.
    19. Charlotte Guénard & Sandrine Mesplé-Somps, 2004. "Measuring inequalities: Do the surveys give the real picture? Study of two surveys in Cote d’Ivoire and Madagascar," Working Papers DT/2004/13, DIAL (Développement, Institutions et Mondialisation), revised Dec 2004.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    poverty; unemployment; South Africa; statistics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A1 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics

    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:ctw:wpaper:07123. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Waseema Petersen The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Waseema Petersen to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpuctza.html .

    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.