The socioeconomic dimensions of racial inequality in South Africa: A social space perspective.

It is well evidenced that South Africa is characterised by extreme socioeconomic inequality, which is strongly racialised. We offer an original sociological perspective, which departs from established perspectives considering the dynamics of vulnerability and poverty to focus on the structuring of classed and racialised privilege. We map how stocks of economic, cultural, and social capital intersect to generate systematic and structural inequalities in the country and consider how far these are associated with fundamental racial divides. To achieve this, we utilise rich, nationally representative data from the National Income Dynamics Study and employ Multiple Correspondence Analysis to construct a model of South African 'social space'. Our findings underscore how entrenched racial divisions remain within South Africa, with White people being overwhelmingly located in the most privileged positions. However, our cluster analysis also indicates that forms of middle-class privilege percolate beyond a core of the 8% of the population that is white. We emphasise how age divisions are associated with social capital accumulation. Our cluster analysis reveals that trust levels increase with economic and cultural capital levels within younger age groups and could therefore come to intensify social and racial divisions.

Labour Market Dynamics in South Africa at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This paper conducts an analysis of labour market dynamics in South Africa during the initial period of lockdown, from the end of March to the end of April 2020, using the first wave of the NIDS-CRAM (2020) survey. Within our sample of over 6,000 adults aged 18 to 59, we found that there was a very large decrease in employment. The fraction of the sample that was conventionally classified as employed decreased from 57% in February to 48% in April. If we further exclude temporarily absent workers, which we term "furloughed" employees, this fraction decreases further to 38%. Thus, about one out of every three employed people in our sample either lost their job or did not work and received no wages during April. This has extremely large implications for poverty and welfare. We further analyse the labour market by comparing across demographic groups as defined by race, by gender, by age groups, by geographic areas and by education levels. The over-arching finding from this analysis is that the job losses were not uniformly distributed amongst the different groups. In particular, groups who have always been more vulnerable - such as women, African/Blacks, youth and less educated groups - have been disproportionately negatively affected.

Piketty comes to South Africa.

One of the most valuable features of Capital and Ideology is its concern to take history seriously and consider how the emergence of different political and economic regimes relate to discourses about fairness and justice across time. This paper pushes this agenda further by acknowledging that the experience of a few developed nations should not be taken as the template for the generalized study of inequality dynamics across time and space. In this paper, we interrogate Piketty's analysis and policy proposals against specificities that are central to understanding the production and reproduction of inequalities within South Africa. We reflect on the South African case, the structure of inequality and its changes since 1994. We review a battery of policy interventions that have been implemented to address inequality in the last 25 years. We emphasize that the long shadow cast by centuries of colonialism and various forms of apartheid strongly affirm Piketty's emphasis on understanding history. But this is both affirmation and critique given the foundational, imbedded impact that this specific legacy has had on post-apartheid society and its policies. Piketty is aware that the levels of inequality in South Africa are so high that this is "unknown territory." We map out some of this territory to reveal how these extreme initial wealth and racial inequities inform the reproduction of inequalities in all dimensions and undermine well intentioned policies. We claim that understanding extractive histories, imbedded wealth inequalities, and complex social and political institutions allows us to understand and confront some of the reasons why even in light of progressive policies, many of which are in line with the proposals from Piketty, government interventions have thus far failed to reduce inequality.

The influence of older classmates on adolescent sexual behavior in Cape Town, South Africa.

This study examines the influence of exposure to older within-grade peers on sexual behavior among students in urban South Africa. Data are drawn from the Cape Area Panel Study, a longitudinal survey of young people conducted in metropolitan Cape Town from 2002 to 2006. The combination of early sexual debut, high rates of school enrollment into the late teens, and grade repetition create an environment in which young people who progress through school ahead of many in their cohort interact with classmates who may be several years older. We construct a measure of cumulative exposure to classmates who are at least two years older and show that such exposure is statistically significantly associated with early sexual initiation among adolescent girls. This exposure also increases the age difference between these girls and their first sexual partner, and helps explain a significant proportion of the earlier sexual debut of African girls, compared with colored and white girls in Cape Town.

Sexual behavior, pregnancy, and schooling among young people in urban South Africa.

This study examines transitions in schooling, sexual activity, and pregnancy among adolescents and young adults in urban South Africa. Data are analyzed from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a recently collected longitudinal survey of young adults and their families in metropolitan Cape Town. We find that teen pregnancy is not entirely inconsistent with continued schooling, especially for African (black) women. More than 50 percent of African women who were pregnant at age 16 or 17 were enrolled in school the following year. We estimate probit regressions to identify the impact of individual and household characteristics on sexual debut, pregnancy, and school dropout between 2002 and 2005. We find that male and female students who performed well on a literacy and numeracy exam administered in 2002 were less likely than those who performed more poorly to become sexually active and less likely to drop out of school by 2005. Surprisingly, 14-16-year-olds who had completed more grades in school in 2002, conditional on their age, were more likely than those who had completed fewer grades to have become sexually active by 2005, a potential indicator of peer effects resulting from the wide dispersion in age per grade in South African schools. Overall, this study shows the importance of accounting for a measure that reflects the knowledge and skills of young people in an examination of their transitions to adulthood.