IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this article

Social Assistance, Gender, And The Aged In South Africa

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Justine Burns
  • Malcolm Keswell
  • Murray Leibbrandt

Abstract

This paper reviews the history of the noncontributory social pension in South Africa, as well as recent work on the distributional and poverty-alleviating effects of this program. The pension has a strong gender dimension, reaching three times as many women as men, and has an unambiguous impact on reducing household poverty, particularly among Black South African households. The existing literature also suggests that the pension reaches unintended beneficiaries within households and that strongly gender-differentiated patterns emerge both in the sharing of pension incomes by pensioners and in the behavioral responses of other household members to pension receipt.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13545700500115944
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Article provided by Taylor & Francis Journals in its journal Feminist Economics.

Volume (Year): 11 (2005)
Issue (Month): 2 ()
Pages: 103-115

as
in new window

Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:11:y:2005:i:2:p:103-115
DOI: 10.1080/13545700500115944
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20

Order Information: Web: http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

Keywords: Social pensions; welfare and poverty; income pooling;

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as
in new window


  1. Case, Anne & Deaton, Angus, 1998. "Large Cash Transfers to the Elderly in South Africa," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 108(450), pages 1330-1361, September.
  2. Esther Duflo, 2000. "Child Health and Household Resources in South Africa: Evidence from the Old Age Pension Program," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(2), pages 393-398, May.
  3. Kingdon, Geeta Gandhi & Knight, John, 2004. "Unemployment in South Africa: The Nature of the Beast," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 391-408, March.
  4. Leibbrandt, M.V. & Woolard, C.D. & Woolard, I.D., 1996. "The Contribution of Income Components to Income Inequality in South Africa. A Decomposable Gini Analysis," Papers 125a, World Bank - Living Standards Measurement.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.

as
in new window


Cited by:

  1. Matthias Doepke & Michèle Tertilt, 2010. "Does Female Empowerment Promote Economic Development?," Working Papers id:3189, eSocialSciences.
  2. Alex Sienaert, 2007. "Migration, Remittances and Public Transfers: Evidence from South Africa," Economics Series Working Papers 351, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
  3. Michael Rogan, 2016. "Gender and Multidimensional Poverty in South Africa: Applying the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 126(3), pages 987-1006, April.
  4. repec:eee:cysrev:v:78:y:2017:i:c:p:177-188 is not listed on IDEAS
  5. Alexis Sienaert, 2008. "The Labour Supply Effects of the South African State Old Age Pension: Theory, Evidence and Implications," SALDRU Working Papers 20, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
  6. Schatz, Enid & Gómez-Olivé, Xavier & Ralston, Margaret & Menken, Jane & Tollman, Stephen, 2012. "The impact of pensions on health and wellbeing in rural South Africa: Does gender matter?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(10), pages 1864-1873.
  7. Schatz, Enid & Ogunmefun, Catherine, 2007. "Caring and Contributing: The Role of Older Women in Rural South African Multi-generational Households in the HIV/AIDS Era," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 35(8), pages 1390-1403, August.
  8. Kehinde O. Omotoso & Steven F. Koch, 2017. "Gender Differentials in Health: A Differences-in-Decompositions Estimate," Working Papers 201717, University of Pretoria, Department of Economics.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:11:y:2005:i:2:p:103-115. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Michael McNulty)

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.