The Unequal Burden of Income Poverty on Time Use in South Africa

Burca Kizilirmak () and Emel Memis ()
Additional contact information
Burca Kizilirmak: Department of Economics, Ankara University
Emel Memis: Department of Economics, Ankara University & Levy Economics Institute, NY, USA

World Journal of Applied Economics, 2019, vol. 5, issue 2, 31-51

Abstract: This study aims to contribute to the research on poverty by analysing the association of income poverty with gender inequalities in time use patterns. Based on South Africa's first time-use data compiled in 2000, we explore whether household income poverty has any in uence on the typical patterns of time use of women and men. Controlling for a variety of household and individual characteristics, we assess the extent to which living in income poverty produce long hours of work - in particular unpaid work hours- using bivariate and multivariate Tobit estimations. Our results show asymmetric impacts of income poverty on women's and men's time allocations controlling for the widely accepted determining factors. While women in poor households spend more time on unpaid work activities, we do not see any significant change in men's unpaid work time with poverty status. Women's total paid and unpaid work time is higher under poverty as the increase in their unpaid work time extends away from the decline in paid work time. Other findings obtained provide supporting evidence presented in previous research: being married/cohabiting with a partner has an increasing impact on women's unpaid work, whereas an opposite impact is observed for their male counterparts. Women's unpaid work time increases with the number of preschool children, whereas it is the paid work time which rises in case of men's work time.

Keywords: Unpaid work; Time use; Gender-based inequality; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 I32 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journal.econworld.org/index.php/econworld/article/view/115/40 (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:ana:journl:v:5:y:2019:i:2:p:31-51

DOI: 10.22440/wjae.5.2.1

Access Statistics for this article

World Journal of Applied Economics is currently edited by Unal Tongur

More articles in World Journal of Applied Economics from WERI-World Economic Research Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Unal Tongur ().