世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This article evaluates the impact of a large cash transfer program in South Africa on children's nutritional status and investigates whether the gender of the recipient affects that impact. In the early 1990s the benefits and coverage of the South African social pension program were expanded for the black population. In 1993 the benefits were about twice the median per capita income in rural areas. More than a quarter of black South African children under age five live with a pension recipient. Estimates suggest that pensions received by women had a large impact on the anthropometric status (weight for height and height for age) of girls but little effect on that of boys. No similar effect is found for pensions received by men. This suggests that the efficiency of public transfer programs may depend on the gender of the recipient.

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Grandmothers and Granddaughters: Old‐Age Pensions and Intrahousehold Allocation in South Africa

Utility Analysis and the Consumption Function: An Interpretation of Cross-Section Data

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/32027/1/558658229.pdf

How Effective Are Poor Schools? Poverty and Educational Outcomes in South Africa.

https://www.bazarconomia.org/pluginfile.php/50/mod_forum/attachment/84/frikkie-using%20an%20asset%20index%20to%20assess%20trends%20in%20poverty%20in%20seven%20SSA%20countries.pdf

Using an Asset Index to Assess Trends in Poverty in Seven Sub-Saharan African Countries

This paper provides a broad overview of the economic dimensions of the educational situation in South Africa a decade after the political transition. An important question is whether changes since the transition have substantially ameliorated the role of race in education. Census and survey data show that quantitative educational attainment differentials (years of education) have been substantially reduced, but qualitative differentials remain larger. Despite massive resource shifts to black schools, overall matriculation results did not improve in the post-apartheid period. Thus the school system contributes little to supporting the upward mobility of poor children in the labour market. The persistence of former racial inequalities is reflected in extremely poor pass rates in mainly black schools (the majority of schools), with high standard deviations. Regressions of matriculation pass rates from school level data show that racial composition of schools--as proxy for former school department--remains a major explanatory factor besides socio-economic background (as measured by school fees set by school governing bodies) and educational inputs (measured by teacher--pupil ratios and teacher salaries as proxy for qualifications and experience). Furthermore, remarkable differentials in performance among black schools cannot be accounted for by socio-economic background or teaching resources, pointing to the importance of school management. The malfunctioning of large parts of the school system appears largely a problem of x-inefficiency rather than allocative efficiency. This requires urgent attention to the functioning of poorly performing schools, to permit continued upward mobility of the largest part of the workforce as well as to support sustained economic growth. Copyright 2007 The author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

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Apartheid's Enduring Legacy: Inequalities in Education

Research on income distribution in South Africa has, for obvious reasons, focused on interracial (inter-group) income distribution. Quite dramatic changes have occurred in interracial income distribution patterns since the 1970s, with the black share of income rising for the first time and at times exceeding the rise in their population share. This implies a narrowing inter-racial income gap. Data on income distribution remain scarce, so that it remains difficult to obtain the full picture about changes in income distribution. In particular, widening inequality within the black population has received much attention. Rises in black unemployment and in black wages have had inequality-inducing effects on black incomes. Is maldistribution of income between races now making way for maldistribution of income within race groups? Put differently, is inequality shifting from inter-group to intra-group inequality (from between group to within group inequality)? This paper pieces together information from various sources of data (censuses, household surveys, marketing surveys, published wage data series, etc.) to inform estimates of interand intra-group distribution over a longer time frame, in an effort to improve analysis of income inequality and poverty trends. These income distribution patterns also have considerable implications for the growth and evolution of the South African consumer market.

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Changing patterns of South African income distribution: Towards time series estimates of distribution and poverty

Under apartheid, the trappings of a welfare state for whites were created. Over time, social security was gradually extended to other groups, and recently social assistance benefits were equalised. This left South Africa with high social security levels for a middle‐income developing country. However, the social security system still largely reflects the historical needs of vulnerable white groups under apartheid, among whom unemployment was minimal, given their preferential access to jobs and education. Thus the social security system now has inadequate provision for the most vulnerable, the unemployed. In contrast, four out of five pensioners receive a means‐tested social pension — a major poverty‐alleviating factor in rural black communities. This article analyses the social security system against the backdrop of apartheid and the more recent democratisation, and assesses its major deficiencies, the forces acting for its expansion and the binding fiscal constraint.

Servaas van der Berg

Papers

How Effective Are Poor Schools? Poverty and Educational Outcomes in South Africa.

Using an Asset Index to Assess Trends in Poverty in Seven Sub-Saharan African Countries

Apartheid's Enduring Legacy: Inequalities in Education

Changing patterns of South African income distribution: Towards time series estimates of distribution and poverty

South African social security under apartheid and beyond 1