Jonathan Argent

Bio: Jonathan Argent is an academic researcher from World Bank. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poverty & Income distribution. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 7 publications receiving 611 citations. Previous affiliations of Jonathan Argent include International Finance Corporation & University of Cape Town.

Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty since the Fall of Apartheid

Abstract: This report presents a detailed analysis of changes in both poverty and inequality since the fall of Apartheid, and the potential drivers of such developments. Use is made of national survey data from 1993, 2000 and 2008. These data show that South Africa’s high aggregate level of income inequality increased between 1993 and 2008. The same is true of inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racial groups. Income poverty has fallen slightly in the aggregate but it persists at acute levels for the African and Coloured racial groups. Poverty in urban areas has increased. There have been continual improvements in non-monetary well-being (for example, access to piped water, electricity and formal housing) over the entire post-Apartheid period up to 2008. From a policy point of view it is important to flag the fact that intra-African inequality and poverty trends increasingly dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa. Race-based redistribution may become less effective over time relative to policies addressing increasing inequality within each racial group and especially within the African group. Rising inequality within the labourmarket – due both to rising unemployment and rising earnings inequality – lies behind rising levels of aggregate inequality. These labour market trends have prevented the labour market from playing a positive role in poverty alleviation. Social assistance grants (mainly the child support grant, the disability grant and the old-age pension) alter the levels of inequality only marginally but have been crucial in reducing poverty among the poorest households. There are still a large number of families that are ineligible for grants because of the lack of appropriate documents. This suggests that there is an important role for the Department of Home Affairs in easing the process of vital registration.

Livestock asset transfers with and without training: Evidence from Rwanda

Abstract: We present evidence from Rwanda's Girinka (‘One Cow per Poor Family’) program that has distributed more than 130,000 livestock asset transfers in the form of cows to the rural poor since 2006. Supply side constraints on the program resulted in some beneficiaries receiving complementary training with the cow transfer, and other households not receiving such training with their cow. We exploit these differences to estimate the additional impact of receiving complementary training with the cow transfer, on household's economic outcomes up to six years after having received the livestock asset transfer. Our results show that even in a setting such as rural Rwanda where linkages between farmers and produce markets are weak, the provision of training with asset transfers has permanent and economically significant impacts on milk production, milk yields from livestock, household earnings, and asset accumulation. The results have important implications for the design of ‘ultra-poor’ livestock asset transfer programs being trialled globally as a means to allow the rural poor to better their economic lives.

Changes in income poverty over the post-apartheid period : an analysis based on data from the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development and the 2008 base wave of the National Income Dynamics Study

Abstract: This paper compares the level and distribution of income poverty in the 2008 National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) to that measured in the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD). Attempts are made to make the income variables as comparable as possible across the two surveys. This requires that agricultural income and implied rental income from owner-occupied housing are excluded from the measure of income. The potential bias resulting from these exclusions is also discussed. The paper finds that aggregate poverty fell between 1993 and 2008 and that this result is robust for a wide range of poverty lines. The poverty profile has changed over time, however. Urban poverty has increased significantly, driven largely by increased migration from rural to urban areas. The share of poverty in households where the household head has incomplete secondary education has also increased markedly.

Competition in Kenyan markets and its impact on income and poverty : a case study on sugar and maize

Abstract: This paper investigates the link between competitive, well-functioning food markets and consumer welfare. The paper explores two key food markets in Kenya -- sugar and maize -- and argues that a variety of factors conspire to distort market prices upward. Distortionary factors include import tariff policy, nontariff barriers, potential anticompetitive conduct by firms, and direct state intervention in markets. Changes in sugar and maize prices are shown to have significant welfare effects on consumers. Equivalent income effects are estimated using the most recent available representative household survey data -- the Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey 2005/06. The paper shows that relaxing trade barriers to allow sugar prices to fall by 20 percent could reduce poverty by 1.5 percent. Similarly, adjusting government interventions in the maize market, which have been shown to inflate maize prices by 20 percent on average, could reduce poverty by 1.8 percent. The magnitude of the estimated income effects may vary based on updated household-level consumption data, assumptions regarding demand elasticities, and estimates of import parity prices for these staples. However, in all the scenarios, more competitive prices have a larger average effect on the poorest households in urban and rural areas, supporting the relevance of effective competition policies for poverty reduction strategies.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Abstract: In the West are the 'haves', while much of the rest of the world are the 'have-nots'. The extent of inequality today is unprecedented. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, Why Nations Fail looks at the root of the problems facing some nations. Economists and scientists have offered useful insights into the reasons for certain aspects of poverty, such as Jeffrey Sachs (it's geography and the weather), and Jared Diamond (it's technology and species). But most theories ignore the incentives and institutions that populations need to invest and prosper: they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and the key to ensuring these incentives is sound institutions. Incentives and institutions are what separate the have and have-nots. Based on fifteen years of research, and stepping boldly into the territory of Ian Morris's Why the West Rules - For Now, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. And, perhaps most importantly, they provide a pragmatic basis for the hope that those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity.

Book Review: OECD, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries:

Abstract: Será que a desigualdade de rendimentos aumentou durante os últimos tempos? Quem ganhou e quem perdeu neste processo? Este processo afectou todos os países da OCDE uniformemente? Em que medida é que maiores desigualdades de rendimentos são a consequência de maiores diferenças nos rendimentos dos trabalhadores e até que ponto são afectados por outros factores? Finalmente, como é que a redistribuição governamental através do sistema de benefícios fiscais afecta estas tendências?

Homogeneous Middles vs. Heterogeneous Tails, and the End of the ‘Inverted‐U’: It's All About the Share of the Rich

Abstract: This article examines distributional disparities within nations. There are six main conclusions. First, about 80 per cent of the world's population now lives in regions whose median country has a Gini close to 40. Second, as outliers are now only located among middle-income and rich countries, the ‘upwards’ side of the ‘Inverted-U’ between inequality and income per capita has evaporated (and with it the hypothesis that posits that ‘things have to get worse before they can get better’). Third, among middle-income countries, Latin America and mineral-rich Southern Africa are uniquely unequal, while Eastern Europe follows a distributional path similar to the Nordic countries. Fourth, among rich countries there is a large (and growing) distributional diversity. Fifth, within a global trend of rising inequality, there are two opposite forces at work. One is ‘centrifugal’ and leads to an increased diversity in the shares of the top 10 per cent and bottom 40 per cent. The other is ‘centripetal’ and leads to a growing uniformity in the income-share appropriated by deciles 5 to 9. Therefore, half of the world's population (the middle and upper-middle classes) have acquired strong ‘property rights’ over half of their respective national incomes; the other half of this income, however, is increasingly up for grabs between the very rich and the poor. And sixth, globalization is thus creating a distributional scenario in which what really matters is the income-share of the rich (because the rest ‘follows’).

The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

Abstract: Thomas Piketty’s (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future, because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions, as well as the endogenous evolution of technology, in shaping the distribution of resources in society. We use regression evidence to show that the main economic force emphasized in Piketty’s book, the gap between the interest rate and the growth rate, does not appear to explain historical patterns of inequality (especially, the share of income accruing to the upper tail of the distribution). We then use the histories of inequality of South Africa and Sweden to illustrate that inequality dynamics cannot be understood without embedding economic factors in the context of economic and political institutions, and also that the focus on the share of top incomes can give a misleading characterization of the true nature of inequality.

Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa

Abstract: Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa. By Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 464p. $55.00. Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass present an immense amount of quantitative and qualitative information regarding inequality in South Africa during the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. Their descriptive findings involve assertions that both support and challenge existing knowledge. For example, they conclude that during the apartheid era, there was significant redistribution of income by the state to poorer sections of the population; that apartheid “converted the state-imposed advantages of race into the market-rewarded advantages of class” (p. 379); the “deracialization” of class began not with the assumption of power by the African National Congress in 1994 but rather in the early 1970s; the end of apartheid has not led to a reduction but to an increase of inequality; the “distributive regime” that produces inequality did not really change after majority rule was achieved in 1994; there are now as many rich black South Africans as there are white South Africans; and that the most significant contributor to inequality is the high level of unemployment.