Determinants of Income Mobility and Household Poverty Dynamics in South Africa

By I. Woolard, Stephan Klasen. Social Science Research Network, 2005

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article analyses household income mobility among Africans in South Africa's most populous province, KwaZulu-Natal, between 1993 and 1998. Compared to industrialised and most developing countries, mobility has been quite high, as might have been expected after the transition in South Africa. This finding is robust when measurement error is controlled for. When disaggregating the sources of mobility, it is found that demographic changes and employment changes account for most of the mobility observed which is related to rapidly shifting household boundaries and a very volatile labour market in an environment of high unemployment. Using a multivariate analysis, it can be seen that transitory incomes play a large role. Four types of poverty traps are found, associated with large initial household size, poor initial education, poor initial asset endowment and poor initial employment access that dominate the otherwise observed regression towards the mean.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3c7007e5900e7bc3b05c4b980954672de45c990

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Exploring poverty traps and social exclusion in South Africa using qualitative and quantitative data (2006, background): “While it is always possible to argue that these trends are the temporary aberrations of structural adjustment, this paper explores the idea that they represent a deeper and more systemic component of the South African social and economic reality, arising from poverty traps such as those identified b”
Rural Livelihoods in South Africa: Complexity, Vulnerability and Differentiation (2013, unknown): “…various household demographic, labour market and economic effects.8 In terms of household demography, as state cash transfers often represent the largest regular infusion of cash into rural areas, many households are effectively formed around a recipient pensioner (Woolard and Klassen 2004).”
Nonfarm employment, agricultural shocks, and poverty dynamics: evidence from rural Uganda (2006, background): “These studies commonly show that poverty status changes significantly even in the short run (Adato et al., 2006; Barrett et al., 2006; Little et al., 2006; Peters, 2006; Whitehead, 2006; Woodlard and Klasen, 2005).”
The determinants of poverty dynamics in Indonesia: evidence from panel data (2013, background): “This is consistent with Woolard and Klasen’s (2005) finding that female-headed households tend to fall into poverty in South Africa.”