Family formation and economic insecurity among youth in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Youth unemployment continues to be a burden and concern for the South African government. Being economically insecure, the situation is dire with the government needing to provide resources to a population who should be economically independent. There is a need to look at the social determinants of economic insecurity among youth in South Africa. Family formations could either promote or inhibit economic well-being. This article aims to assess whether economic security improves as youth enter into unions and/or have children. The South African National Income Dynamics Study is used. Unmarried youth with no children are measured at baseline (2008) and followed up over time to examine whether economic security status changes as union status changes. Results show that while economic security, employment (from 7.61% to 25.67%) and net income per month (from 19.48% to 32.79%) increase over time, youth who marry but have no children have the lowest risk of economic insecurity (relative risk ratio?=?0.02, p < 0.05) compared with those who remain unmarried but have children. Special attention needs to be given to youth who have children and are unmarried and among those who marry and have children soon after.     

The implications of differing tourist/resident perceptions for community-based resource management: a Hawaiian coastal resource area study

Despite globally increasing interest in restoring local-level management of natural resources, few studies examine differences between residents’ and tourists’ place connections and implications for community-based natural resource management. This article reports findings from a survey (n = 264) in Haena, Kauai, Hawaii, where resource management is shifting from state-level government to local residents. Tasked with creating new, local-level rules governing use of coastal resources, Haena community members must consider the perspectives, resource use, and values of residents as well as of multiple, diverse user groups including the burgeoning tourist population. We found significant differences in how residents and tourists learn about the area; the activities in which they engage; their perceptions of resource health; who they think is responsible for caretaking of resources; and their views of personal responsibilities to the place. The findings have implications for local-level resource management and use of popular tourist destinations including the importance of guidebooks in mediating visitor perceptions of a place, the possibility of concurrent but separate visitor and resident use of the same area, visitors’ and residents’ sense of responsibility to mitigate impacts of their actions, and the potential of engaging residents’ place caretaking preferences toward more organized community-based resource management efforts.     

Reassessing Moral Legitimacy in Times of Instability

The presence of conflicting cues about what is legitimate provided by various stakeholders, begs the question of how the legitimacy of contested institutionalized practices is justified. Recent critique of tax minimization strategies exemplifies this difficulty: on one hand, practitioners need to increase shareholders' profits; on the other, a growing number of stakeholders push for ‘fairer’ corporate tax payments. Conducted during a time of public criticism of Australian corporate tax strategies, our study draws on justifications of corporate tax minimization strategies by senior tax practitioners and corporate submissions to a Senate Inquiry on corporate tax avoidance. The study explores how legitimacy judgements come under pressure by conflicting cues. Through the application of Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) Economies of Worth (EW) framework, we advance legitimacy scholarship by clarifying what constitutes situated judgements in times of instability. Our work puts forward the concept of perceived forecasted consensus as a guide for individuals in making situated legitimacy judgements in times of instability.     

National minorities and their representation in social surveys: which practices make a difference?

This paper presents a systematic study of survey mechanisms that produce or reduce minority bias in social surveys. It extends the work of Lipps et al. (2011) who have demonstrated that, in the Swiss context, the more an ethno-national minority community differs, socio-culturally and socio-economically, from the national majority, the less it is likely to be represented in its proper proportion in the major national surveys. Minority bias furthermore has a vertical dimension: socio-economic bias against individuals from the most deprived backgrounds becomes extreme within ethno-national minority communities. Using data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, the Swiss Household Panel, and the Swiss sample of the European Social Survey, in the present work we empirically assess the impact of three types of survey practices on minority bias: (1) strategies to increase overall response rates of the whole population indiscriminately from its minority status, (2) the use of pre- and post-stratification measures that take into account the overall share of foreigners in the national population, and (3) the conduct of interviews in a wider range of languages, in order to facilitate survey response among certain (linguistic) minorities. Our findings show that efforts to increase overall response rates can, paradoxically, create even more minority bias. On the other hand, they suggest that a combination of stratified sampling and a wider range of survey languages can have a positive effect in reducing survey bias, both between and within national categories. We conclude that measures that take into account and adapt to the social and cultural heterogeneity of surveyed populations do make a difference, whereas additional efforts that only replicate existing routine practices can be counter-productive.     

Estimating Cash Usage: The Impact of Survey Design on Research Outcomes

We employ a unique dataset of transaction records to analyse the impact of survey set-up on consumers’ payments registration behaviour. Survey data are used for econometric analyses and validated against other payments data. The results reveal that the length of the registration period influences consumers’ registration of payments. Measurement errors are minimised when consumers use a self-reported transaction diary for one single day. Around 40 % of the transactions registered in a one-day survey are missed out in a one-week survey. Apart from payments research, the results are, among others, also relevant for household expenditure and marketing research.     

Collateralized Social Relations: The Social in Economic Calculation

Traditionally, economists have viewed social relations as "friction" or "impediments" to exchange and have excluded social relations from their analyses by assuming autonomous actors. Recently, however, a number of scholars—economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists—have begun to discuss the numerous ways in which social arrangements both prompt and channel economic activity. Rational choice theory, social capital and network analysis, and agency and game theory, are among those approaches that consider the effects of social relations on economic action. In this paper we extend that discussion by arguing that social relations can function as "collateral" or assurance that an economic transaction will proceed as agreed by the parties involved. We review recent microeconomic theories and conjecture how they might be developed following this observation, which is derived from sociological and anthropological studies of economic action and organization.     

Implicit incentives and reputational herding by hedge fund managers

Several theories of reputation suggest that managers' incentives affect their propensity to engage in herding behavior. This paper investigates these theories by tracking hedge fund managers' herding behavior over their careers. I first examine managerial incentives for herding, and show that more senior managers that deviate from the herd have a significantly higher probability of failure and do not experience higher fund inflows than their less-senior counterparts. These implicit incentives should encourage managers to herd more as their careers progress. I find strong support for this hypothesis: using a number of proxies for herding, I show that more experienced managers herd more than less-experienced managers. Finally, I examine performance differences between more and less-experienced managers, and find that while more experienced managers underperform less-experienced managers, this underperformance does not appear to be caused by differences in herding. Overall, these results are in direct contrast with studies of mutual fund managers, reflecting important difference in implicit incentives between the two industries.     

Barriers and levers to future exploration in practice experiences in policy-making

In this paper the first findings of a retrospective scan of the use of future exploration methods in strategic policy-making processes in the public domain in the Netherlands and Belgium will be addressed. The barriers and leverage points as experienced by the policy-makers involved will be assessed from their perspective as end-users who have applied foresight methods in their policy-making activities. By means of four case studies, the success factors and barriers that policy-makers encounter as they apply future exploration methods will be elaborated on. Attention will be paid to the different motives and intentions employed when opting for future exploration methods. The case studies are based on policy document analyses and in-depth interviews with users in the policy domain, all conducted in view of building empirical evidence.