MEASURING POVERTY AND DEPRIVATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Stephan Klasen

Review of Income and Wealth, 2000, vol. 46, issue 1, 33-58

Abstract: This paper compares a standard expenditure‐based poverty measure with a specifically created composite measure of deprivation using household survey data from South Africa. While there is a strong overall correlation between expenditures and levels of deprivation, the correlation is much weaker among the worst‐off South Africans. In addition, the two measures differ considerably in the impact of race, headship, location (urban, rural), and household size on expenditure poverty versus deprivation. In general, the deprivation measure finds more Africans, rural dwellers, members of de facto female‐headed households, and members of smaller households deprived than expenditure poor. Only the differences in the effect of household size on poverty are sensitive to assumptions about equivalence scales. As a result, the two measures diverge greatly in identifying the poorest and most deprived sections of the population, which may have considerable consequences for targeting.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (175)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4991.2000.tb00390.x

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:bla:revinw:v:46:y:2000:i:1:p:33-58

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0034-6586

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Income and Wealth is currently edited by Conchita D'Ambrosio and Robert J. Hill

More articles in Review of Income and Wealth from International Association for Research in Income and Wealth Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().