Resistance to coal inequalities and the possibilities of a just transition in South Africa*

ABSTRACT

Coal mining and burning are among the most destructive activities on the planet, and a major driver of environmental inequality in South Africa. This article suggests that, despite heavy constraints, initiatives involving resistance to coal are building a ‘counter-power’ which challenges inequality, generates solidarity, and is potentially infused by imaginative visions of another world beyond coal. Following the ‘social power’ approach this vision could, with deeper connections between three sites of resistance to coal – organised labour, mining affected communities and environmental justice organisations – cohere into a vision of a ‘just transition’. This could embed the anti-coal struggle in a social movement for an alternative development path to challenge deepening poverty and inequality.     

Poverty,human rights law and socio-economic realities in South Africa†

South Africa is a nation of immense variety. It has rich cultural diversity, an enviable climate and an abundance of natural resources. However, it is also a nation with vast economic disparities and a highly unequal distribution of income. Hence, in spite of abundant resources and a seemingly vibrant economy, South Africa still faces an enormous poverty problem that is fundamentally no different from that of other African countries. As in many other African countries this problem of poverty is compounded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic; by high levels of unemployment; by low levels of education; and by a number of other factors. Today, South Africa has one of the best constitutions in the world and a Bill of Rights that contains an array of justiciable socio-economic rights. The South African government has also attempted to alleviate poverty and mitigate its effects through progressively developing and expanding a social welfare system and other programmes such as the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy. The purpose of this article is to analyse the role of human rights (specifically the Bill of Rights in the Constitution) and government efforts to alleviate poverty (through certain programmes and service delivery) in the face of adverse socio-economic realities in South Africa.     

The challenge of growth,employment and poverty in the South African economy since democracy: an exploratory review of selected issues

The welfare challenges in post‐apartheid South Africa are best represented by the triumvirate of poverty, income inequality and unemployment. In turn, the one generally accepted mechanism for overcoming these challenges is for an economy to realise sustained levels of high economic growth. Herein lie the essential coordinates of this article. We attempt first to describe the post‐apartheid experience with economic growth and its determinants. Secondly, we describe the nature of the welfare challenges that the society faces in terms of poverty, income inequality and unemployment. Finally, and perhaps most critically, we explore the various constraints on economic growth that may be hindering the realisation of higher standards of living amongst the population.     

Measuring wealth inequality in South Africa: An agenda

ABSTRACT

Understanding wealth inequality has unique significance in South Africa. The co-existence of extreme poverty and extreme wealth is starkly visible. Apartheid-era inequality has persisted despite more than 20 years of democracy. Much of the recent research focus on inequality has been on inequality of income and of opportunities, especially quantitatively. With the recent project to release South African tax administrative data for research, this paper hopes to show how use of the tax administrative data can contribute to developing a refreshed quantitative analysis of wealth inequality, especially in estimating the top shares of the wealth distribution, and so contribute to the existing literature on wealth inequality in South Africa. The first section will explore why studying wealth inequality is of fundamental importance. The second section will review international data and methods used to research wealth inequality, before laying out suggested approach to doing such studies in South Africa.     

BUILDING AND LINKING A MICROSIMULATION MODEL TO A CGE MODEL FOR SOUTH AFRICA

This paper examines the microeconomic effects of macroeconomic policies or shocks in South Africa. In particular, the paper considers the effects of macroeconomic policies on poverty and inequality by building and linking a microsimulation (MS) model to a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. In the South African context, where poverty and inequality are at high levels, this novel approach enables us to identify the winners and losers of any policy change, so that the impact on poverty and inequality can be assessed in detail.     

Inequality in South Africa: The distribution of income,expenditure and earnings

This article empirically analyses the state of inequality in South Africa. International comparisons show South Africa to be among the most unequal countries in the world. The levels of income inequality and earnings inequality are analysed with a range of measures and methods. The results quantify the extremely high level of inequality in South Africa. Earnings inequality appears to be falling in recent years, with relative losses in the upper-middle parts of the earnings distribution. Decomposing income inequality by factor source reveals the importance of earnings in accounting for overall income inequality. The article concludes by observing that, internationally, significant sustained decreases in inequality rarely come about without policies aimed at achieving that, and suggests that strong policy interventions would be needed to reduce inequality in South Africa to levels that are in the range typically found internationally.     

Sectoral Growth and Poverty Alleviation: A Multiplier Decomposition Technique Applied to South Africa

How does an increase in a sector's output affect poverty alleviation? In this paper a multiplier decomposition for a socioeconomic system represented by a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is used to study this linkage. The decomposition applied to South Africa reveals that growth in agriculture, services and some manufacturing sectors can alleviate poverty for the black African population. For sectoral growth to be effective, however, the need for appropriate skill acquisition for the poor must be addressed directly. Only long-term policies geared towards improving both economic growth and the human capital stock of the poor can lead to significant poverty alleviation.     

KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) 1993–98: A longitudinal household database for South African policy analysis

An important adjunct of apartheid has been the absence of credible and comprehensive data on which policies, such as poverty reduction strategies, can be grounded. The 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) provided the first comprehensive household database for South Africa. Despite its usefulness, however, the one round PSLSD cannot provide answers to many questions important to policy researchers and practitioners, particularly questions about dynamic processes. The primary objective in this article is to introduce a new longitudinal household database, based on the PSLSD, which begins to fill this gap. Households surveyed by the PSLSD in KwaZulu-Natal province were re-surveyed in 1998 by the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Survey (KIDS). As a research endeavour, the KIDS project addresses one of the most vexing and important problems confronting contemporary South Africa: understanding the forces and mechanisms which contribute to the perpetuation of apartheid's legacy of poverty and inequality.     

Pro-poor growth and social protection in South Africa: Exploring the interactions

This study evaluates the impact of South Africa's long-term economic growth on household poverty and inequality between 1995 and 2005. We find a decline in aggregate levels of poverty, but increasing levels of inequality. The evidence suggests that the growth model provides substantial redistributive income support to the poor through the social grant programme, whilst offering few returns to those in the middle of the distribution.     

Analysing legal mobilisation’s potential to secure equal access to socioeconomic justice in South Africa

ABSTRACT

From the moment South Africa became a liberal democracy, the Government promised to deliver on social security for the poor. However, South African NGOs have reported that several barriers prevent poor South Africans, and black women in particular, from accessing the country’s social assistance system. Government inaction has compelled NGOs to approach the Courts. As reflected in a series of court judgements, many problems faced by the system relate to the administration of payments by South African and multinational corporations. But is this the complete story?

Applying a critical, analytical lens of legal mobilisation to explain the potential of legal mobilisation to secure progressive structural change, this article will assess the extent to which civic-based, legal advocacy aimed at securing access to social grants, and challenging the manner in which these grants have been administered, has the potential to more strategically advance socioeconomic justice and inequality for South Africa’s poor.     

SOUTH AFRICA AND THE NEW PARTNERSHIP FOR AFRICA'S DEVELOPMENT: ECONOMIC SPIN-OFFS AND LINKAGES

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is a concerted effort by Africa's political leaders to develop a comprehensive and integrated strategic policy framework to raise current levels of socio‐economic development and reduce high levels of poverty across the African continent. The NEPAD framework recognises the need for African countries to pool their resources together in order to enhance regional development and economic integration. To this end, NEPAD emphasises capacity building and also seeks to solicit and disburse funds towards infrastructural development programmes and poverty alleviation projects, among others. South Africa's involvement with the rest of Africa has increased significantly since 1994. Trade exports, foreign direct investment (both market and resource‐seeking in nature) and public‐private partnerships have mushroomed in many parts of the continent. Many South African firms are providing the financial impetus for the infrastructural development and rehabilitation of African economies. This paper discusses salient economic linkages between South Africa and the rest of Africa within the framework of NEPAD. South Africa is the economic hub of sub‐Saharan Africa (and indeed of the African continent), with significant agricultural, manufacturing and services capacity. South African firms have invested in the development of a number of sectors in the rest of Africa, taking advantage of the new investment incentives offered by the NEPAD framework. The target sectors range from mining, the hospitality industry, engineering and construction, finance to telecommunications. These investments and economic involvements are crucial to the development of African countries and the relevant sectors that are important for the realisation of some of the objectives of NEPAD.     

LIBERALISING TRADE IN SOUTH AFRICA: A SURVEY OF COMPUTABLE GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM STUDIES

This paper reviews applications of computable general equilibrium models to trade liberalisation in South Africa. It focuses on economic structure, data, macroeconomic closure and results of the models. The models project that trade liberalisation has had small positive impacts on growth. Poverty and inequality outcomes are less clear cut and depend on the model used. Models with fully integrated micro data find that poverty has worsened slightly while inequality has risen. Aggregated models predict that poverty has been reduced by small amounts. Dynamic models report rising inequality but falling poverty incidence. The paper identifies areas for future research.     

Smoke and mirrors? The science of poverty measurement and its application

Measures of poverty are much used, but also much criticised as having limited value in debates on public resource allocation. Some argue that the measures are too conservative and do little more than complicate important issues of inequality and injustice. However, poverty measurement can be sensitive to these concerns if grounded in the field's well-developed theoretical foundation. In South Africa, poverty measures over more than 50 years have consistently taken into account distributional issues and the causes and implications of deprivation, and most South African analyses of poverty have recognised and incorporated the multi-dimensional nature of poverty. Recognising different perceptions of aggregation, time horizon and the role of states and markets is perhaps more important than methodology when assessing what poverty measures can contribute. With proper theorisation, and attention paid to the purpose of poverty diagnostics, measurement is more than sleight-of-hand and can provide both a tool for advocacy and a means to implement policies that promote greater social justice.     

Node selection for the Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme in South Africa

Various programmes and strategies in South Africa aim to reduce poverty. The Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Programme (ISRDP) is a sustained campaign against rural poverty and underdevelopment, implemented in 13 nodes selected on account of their poverty, lack of infrastructure and capacity, and provincial representivity. Using a hierarchy of development regions, data from the 2001 Census and a core-periphery model, this paper evaluates the location of the 13 nodes to determine whether the municipalities in these nodes have high levels of poverty and are in need of development. The findings are that although most of these municipalities have high poverty levels, the nodes also include municipalities with relatively high levels of development. There are also 17 municipalities in South Africa with very low levels of development that are not included as nodes in the ISRDP. Policy-makers need to take cognisance of the macro pattern of spatial economic development.     

Chile: The Unbearable Burden of Inequality

Chile has been cited as a successful case of development. Relatively fast economic growth over almost two decades has been accompanied by a significant reduction in absolute poverty. However, persistent economic growth and a mostly pro-poor structure of public expenditures have not been sufficient to reduce inequality in one of the most unequal countries in the world. We show that the key factors explaining this persistent inequality have been a low level of fiscal expenditures caused by low tax revenues that have not permitted enough public investment in human capital and knowledge generation and diffusion.     

Non-monetary dimensions of well-being in South Africa, 1993–2004: A post-apartheid dividend?

Existing studies on shifts in income welfare in South Africa since the demise of apartheid suggest that income inequality increased, while headcount poverty rates declined since 2000, after some evidence of an increase or no change in poverty in the 1995–2000 and 1996–2001 periods. This study provides an analysis of the shifts in non-income welfare that have occurred in South Africa between 1993 and 2004. We use factor analysis to construct an asset index as a measure of non-income-based welfare. Variables reflecting household access to a range of services and assets are used in the construction of the index. Significantly different results emerge when non-income welfare shifts are considered: we show statistically significant decreases in the headcount asset poverty rates between 1993 and 2004 across a range of covariates. Finally, asset inequality decreased significantly between 1993 and 2004 – in stark contrast to results based on consumption data.     

How social security policies and economic transformation affect poverty and inequality: Lessons for South Africa

This article examines how various characteristics of social and economic policy frameworks affect poverty and inequality levels in developing countries, principally in Botswana and Mauritius. The research findings suggest that poverty and inequality are lower in countries with generous and broad-based – rather than pro-poor – social security policies, and where social policies are complemented by economic policies promoting economic transformation rather than mere economic growth. While South Africa's challenges of combating poverty and inequality are shaped by its own historical context, the lessons from other countries offer the opportunity to reflect on the social consequences of various social and economic policy mixtures. In particular, it may be worth considering how to bridge the divide between the economically productive contributors to social security policies and the economically marginalised beneficiaries of such policies.     

Critical representations of Southern African inequality: Transcending outmoded exhibition and museum politics

ABSTRACT

Illustrating inequality to a more general public – beyond those concerned purely with public policy and research – presents various challenges. Museums have often served a function of memorialising both the impressive steps forward and major barriers to social progress, as a form of remembrance and understanding, although the twentieth century format in South Africa was generally embedded within colonial and racist self-glorification. The potential to transcend outmoded exhibition and museum politics with a new approach based on dialogical not didactic presentation, arises with inequality. In this exploration of how such an approach might unfold in the world's most unequal major city (as judged by the Palma Ratio), Johannesburg, the concept of threshold is introduced. Physical and conceptual access through overcoming thresholds is explored through a specific site, the Old Post Office, and through two artifacts that reveal structural power that generates inequality: Durban's sanitation system and Eastern Zimbabwe's diamond fields.     

Exploring the Impact of Energy Sources on Production,Inequality and Poverty in Simultaneous Equations Models for South Africa

Abstract: This work adapts per capita income, energy demand (sub‐group decomposed), inequality and poverty frameworks in a simultaneous equations setting to investigate the role of energy sources on per capita income, inequality and poverty in South Africa. It finds that energy sources (particularly electricity and diesel) are important in estimating production functions. Gasoline, kerosene and coal all exacerbate poverty, with the highest impacts on abject poverty. It is better to disaggregate energy sources in order to capture resource‐specific details. Redistribution efforts that focus on reduction of between‐group inequality can also moderate energy use since between‐group inequality tends to increase the demand for most energy sources. Public efforts are yielding fruits in this direction and should be encouraged. Access to energy sources like electricity, diesel and gas are crucial for productivity enhancement, but for them to yield significant anti‐poverty fruits, efforts must also target broadening capital access by the poor.     

Combating poverty in South Africa

The successful and peaceful political transition in South Africa is regarded as a great accomplishment for its people. Unfortunately, democracy was not accompanied by economic growth and policies that could lead to a meaningful quality of life and an acceptable standard of living for all the country's citizens. There is a need for South Africa to reconcile the expectations resulting from the achievement of democracy with the realities of both the problems and the potential of the economy. As South Africa attempts to alleviate poverty through development, it is essential to balance the ever-increasing and often competing demands against limited natural resources. This article formulates some policies and programmes designed to combat poverty at its source.