Have Labour Market Outcomes Affected Household Structure in South Africa? A Descriptive Analysis of Households

Farah Pirouz ()
Additional contact information
Farah Pirouz: School of Economic and Business Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand

Working Papers from University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit

Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate how the demography of households relates to individual labour market outcomes. We comprehensively examine household size and structures in the October Household Surveys 1995, 1997, 1999 and the Labour Force Surveys September 2001 and 2002. Over the 1995-2002 period, the number of households has increased in the face of rising unemployment and the average household size has decreased signifi cantly. A rising proportion of single households mostly drives this result. We further investigate how such changes in the patterns of household composition could be correlated to changes in labour force participation rates, unemployment rates, and employment rates. We fi nd that employment rates in smaller households are substantially higher und unemployment rates lower than in larger households with more than two adult members. The shares of workless households where no member is employed, and fully employed households, where all working age adult members earn income from work, tell about employment polarisation. In particular, the share of households with unemployed members has doubled to 27 per cent in 2002, and the share of workless households, in which no member is employed, has risen to a third of all South African households. The results highlight some of the wider welfare effects of job losses and other economic variables on households in South Africa.

Keywords: South Africa: unemployment; households; labour markets; employment polarisation; workless households (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2005-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Working Paper Series by the Development Policy Research Unit, October 2005, pages 1-24

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7362 First version, 2005 (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:ctw:wpaper:05100

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Waseema Petersen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).