Wages and wage inequality in South Africa 1994-2011: The evidence from household survey data

dc.creatorWittenberg, Martin
dc.date2014-10-23T11:11:49Z
dc.date2014-10-23T11:11:49Z
dc.date2014-10
dc.date.accessioned2015-05-28T10:06:46Z
dc.date.available2015-05-28T10:06:46Z
dc.date.issued2015-05-28
dc.descriptionWe analyse the long‐term trends in wages in South Africa, using the data from the October Household Surveys, Labour Force Surveys and Quarterly Labour Force Surveys. We show that outliers and missing data need to be taken into consideration when working with these data. Our results show that overall mean real earnings among employees has risen over this period. Median real earnings, by contrast, have lagged. We show that the top end of the earnings distribution has moved away from the median, while there seems to have been a relative compression of the distribution right at the bottom.
dc.descriptionThis paper draws on and extends work reported on in two working papers, Wittenberg and Pirouz (2013) and Wittenberg (2014). Some of the original data work was done with the support of an infrastructure grant to DataFirst from the Redi3x3 project on “Employment/Unemployment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growthʺ. The Vice‐Chancellor’s Strategic Fund of the University of Cape Town paid for the initial construction of the PALMS dataset without which this research would not have been possible. The ILO commissioned some of the initial analyses of wage trends, which are reported in Wittenberg (2014). I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and support from Patrick Belser and Kristen Sobeck in that work.
dc.identifierWittenberg, M. (2014). Wages and wage inequality in South Africa 1994-2011: The evidence from household survey data. A Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit Working Paper Number 135 and DataFirst Technical Paper 26. Cape Town: SALDRU, University of Cape Town
dc.identifier978-1-920517-77-9
dc.identifierhttp://hdl.handle.net/11090/767
dc.identifier.ris TY - Working Paper DA - 2015-05-28 DB - OpenUCT DP - University of Cape Town KW - South Africa KW - Inequality KW - Earnings KW - Data Quality KW - Multiple Imputation LK - https://open.uct.ac.za PB - University of Cape Town PY - 2015 T1 - Wages and wage inequality in South Africa 1994-2011: The evidence from household survey data TI - Wages and wage inequality in South Africa 1994-2011: The evidence from household survey data UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11090/767 ER - en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11090/767
dc.languageen
dc.publisher.departmentSALDRUen_ZA
dc.publisher.facultyFaculty of Commerceen_ZA
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cape Town
dc.relationSALDRU Working Paper;135
dc.subjectSouth Africa
dc.subjectInequality
dc.subjectEarnings
dc.subjectData Quality
dc.subjectMultiple Imputation
dc.titleWages and wage inequality in South Africa 1994-2011: The evidence from household survey data
dc.typeWorking Paper
uct.type.publicationResearchen_ZA
uct.type.resourceWorking Paperen_ZA
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