IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ctw/wpaper/01055.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Consumer Indebtedness Among Urban South African Households: A Descriptive Overview

Author

Listed:
  • Reza Daniels

    (School of Economics, University of Cape Town)

Abstract

This working paper analyses consumer indebtedness among urban South African households. The theoretical basis of the topic lies within consumption theory, and the empirical exercises are conducted on Part Two of the October Household Survey – the Income and Expenditure Survey (Statistics South Africa, 1995) and an adjusted 1999 dataset constructed by Wefa Southern Africa. The primary objective of the paper is to provide a descriptive overview of urban household indebtedness; consequently, we are concerned only with the basic relationships of consumer theory, namely the composition of income and consumption. The results indicate that (1) at the national level, indebtedness trends upwards as income increases while cashflow trends towards a decrease as income increases; (2) there are predictable, Engel’s law consumption patterns amongst the poor and the rich; (3) the composition and sources of debt vary widely between the poor and the rich; (4) between 1995 and 1999, household indebtedness generally increased while household cashflow generally decreased; also, important substitution shifts took place in the consumption schedule, with a greater proportion of income being spend on housing and food.

Suggested Citation

  • Reza Daniels, 2001. "Consumer Indebtedness Among Urban South African Households: A Descriptive Overview," Working Papers 01055, University of Cape Town, Development Policy Research Unit.
  • Handle: RePEc:ctw:wpaper:01055
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7213
    File Function: First version, 2001
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Francis Nathan Okurut, 2006. "Access to credit by the poor in South Africa: Evidence from Household Survey Data 1995 and 2000," Working Papers 13/2006, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    2. Daryl Collins, 2008. "Debt and household finance: evidence from the Financial Diaries," Development Southern Africa, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(4), pages 469-479.
    3. Reboul, E. & Guérin, I. & Nordman, C.J., 2021. "The gender of debt and credit: Insights from rural Tamil Nadu," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 142(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    South Africa: consumption schedule; consumer indebtedness;

    JEL classification:

    • A1 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ctw:wpaper:01055. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Waseema Petersen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpuctza.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.