Racial Wage Discrimination in South Africa: Before and After the First Democratic Election

Gaute Erichsen and Jeremy Wakeford ()
Additional contact information
Jeremy Wakeford: School of Economics, University of Cape Town

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

Abstract: Apartheid in South Africa was formally discarded by the first free election in 1994. Prior to 1994, discrimination in the labour market was embodied in a number of policies (pass laws, occupational colour barring etc.). While such polices have been eliminated by the ANC government, it is likely that the eradication of racial wage discrimination altogether will be a lengthy process. In this working paper, racial wage discrimination is treated via a multilateral wage decomposition technique. Each observed wage differential is broken down into a productivity component and a discrimination component so that the extent of racial wage discrimination can be estimated. Using data collected just before 1993 and just after 1995 the first democratic election, it can be concluded that previous findings of long-term declining discrimination are reversed in the post-apartheid era.

Keywords: South Africa: racial wage discrimination; labour market; labour market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2001-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published in Working Paper Series by the Development Policy Research Unit, May 2001, pages 1-34

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7220 First version, 2001 (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:01049

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 ).