Income mobility and household dynamics in South Africa: the case of KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract

This paper is a study of household income mobility dynamics among Africans in South Africans in South Africa's most populous province between 1993 and 1998. Compared to industrialised and most developing countries, mobility has been quite high, as one would have expected after the transition in South Africa. This finding is also robust to various ways to control for measurement error. When disaggregating the sources of mobility, the researchers find that demographic changes and employment changes account for most of the ability observed which is related to rapidly shifting household boundaries and a very volatile labour market in an environment of high unemployment. In a multivariate analysis, they see that transitory incomes play a large role. They also find three traps associated with large initial household size, poor initial education and poor initial employment access.