This note sets out two different methods on how to adjust incomes in the microdata underlying the standard SOUTHMOD models to reflect a sudden shock, in this case the COVID-19 shock, as done in the accompanying working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021)...
This survey is a collaborative project conducted by researchers of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of...
Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and inequality generated in the labour market is a key driver of inequality.In this paper, I use the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, the General Household Surveys, and administrative tax...
Much work has been done on inequality in South Africa, but to date the literature that assesses the dynamic response of income or wealth distribution to economic policy actions is almost non-existent. This information gap is caused by data...
The contact hypothesis posits that having diverse neighbours may reduce one’s intergroup prejudice. This hypothesis is difficult to test as individuals self-select into neighbourhoods. Using a slum relocation programme in India that randomly assigned...
South Africa has the highest rate of measured inequality in the world. Often thought to be a legacy of the apartheid system, inequality in South Africa has stubbornly persisted. South Africa’s position as highest inequality country in the world has...
As it transitions to an oil-producing country, Uganda’s investments in infrastructure and physical capital will increasingly depend on the ability of the construction sector to respond to surges in demand and transform investment effort into outcomes...
We synthesize the findings from several recent papers on South Africa’s very high income inequality. These papers use new datasets—including income tax data—and new empirical methods to investigate the drivers of household income and individual...
Traditionally, analysts of the South African labour market have used household survey data to describe earnings and employment in the post-Apartheid period. More recently, administrative data from the South African Revenue Service has been made...
A substantial amount of research has been conducted examining inequality in South Africa using multiple data sources. We provide an overview of this research in this paper. Furthermore, we use nationally representative survey data to estimate income...
In the paper 'Aid reimagined: results from an elite survey on perceptions of progress, capacity, and development co-operation', we tabulated responses...
This study presents new empirical results, using microdata from the LIS database, on development patterns in economic inequality for a set of countries that are less covered in the empirical literature, mostly due to the lack of appropriate data...
Top income under-coverage in developing countries not only leads to downward biased inequality indicators but might also affect the ex-ante evaluation of progressive tax reforms. We propose a simple adjustment to top incomes for formal employees (e.g...
This paper investigates the validity of household survey data published by Statistics South Africa since 1993 and later integrated into the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS).A series of statistical adjustments are proposed, compared, and...
The global spread of COVID-19 is one of the largest threats to people and governments since the Second World War. The on-going pandemic and its countermeasures have led to varying physical, psychological, and emotional experiences, shaping not just...
Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries has made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting...
We study how the stringency of policy measures to counter the COVID-19 pandemic affects individuals’ trust in formal institutions. Drawing on micro-level panel data from Germany spanning an 18-month period from the onset of the pandemic, we show that...
Drawing from two labour market experiments in rural India, we offer insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of employment. The first experiment contrasts self-reported estimates of employment with proxy-reported estimates from...
In Mozambique, analysing how and why food prices change is crucial. Understanding the dynamics of price formation is fundamental to mitigate the...
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