Gender Inequality in the South African Labour Market: the Impact of the Child Support Grant

Giorgio d'Agostino and Margherita Scarlato

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The Child Support Grant (CSG) represents one of the major cash transfer implemented in South Africa to address children's vulnerability and household poverty. This paper provides an evaluation of the impact of the CSG on gender inequality by evaluating the effect of the programme on the employment status of adult members of beneficiary households. We use data from the 2008, 2010-2011 and 2012 National Income Dynamics Study and apply a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that exploits the expansion in eligibility due to a discontinous change in the age eligibility criterion. The analysis considers two source of heterogeneity in the impact of the CSG on labour market, i.e. gender and household members receiving the Old Age Pension social grant. In addition, the evaluation identifies differing effects by number of treated children in beneficiary households. Overall, this evaluation shows that the CSG had a negative effect on the probability of being employed of the beneficiary household members and increased gender inequality by strongly discouraging women's employment.

Keywords: Cash transfers; Regression discontinuity design; sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 I38 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hme
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/72523/1/MPRA_paper_72523.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:72523

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().