Schooling as a Lottery: Racial Differences in School Advancement in Urban South Africa

This paper analyzes the large racial differences in progress through secondary school in South Africa. Using recently collected longitudinal data we find that grade advancement is strongly associated with scores on a baseline literacy and numeracy test. In grades 8-11 the effect of these scores on grade progression is much stronger for white and coloured students than for African students, while there is no racial difference in the impact of the scores on passing the nationally standardized grade 12 matriculation exam. We develop a stochastic model of grade repetition that generates predictions consistent with these results. The model predicts that a larger stochastic component in the link between learning and measured performance will generate higher enrollment, higher failure rates, and a weaker link between ability and grade progression. The results suggest that grade progression in African schools is poorly linked to actual ability and learning. The results point to the importance of considering the stochastic component of grade repetition in analyzing school systems with high failure rates.     

The sensitivity to key data imputations of recent estimates of income poverty and inequality in South Africa

Existing literature using South African censuses reports an increase in both poverty and inequality over the 1996 to 2001 period. This paper assesses the robustness of these results to a number of weaknesses in the personal income variable. We use a sequential regression multiple imputation approach to impute missing values and to explicitly assess the influence of implausible income values and different rules used to convert income that is measured in bands into point incomes. Overall our results for 1996 and 2001 confirm the major findings from the existing literature while generating more reliable confidence intervals for the key parameters of interest than are available elsewhere.     

Mortality in South Africa: Socio-economic profile and association with self-reported health

This paper exploits the first two waves of the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) to describe the socio-economic profile of mortality and to assess whether self-rated health status is predictive of mortality between waves. Mortality rates in NIDS are in line with estimates from official death notification data and display the expected hump of excess mortality in early and middle adulthood due to AIDS, with the excess peaking earlier for women than for men. We find evidence of a socio-economic gradient in mortality, with higher rates of mortality for individuals from asset-poor households and with lower levels of education. Consistent with evidence from many industrialised countries and a few developing countries, we find self-rated health to be a significant predictor of two-year mortality, an association that remains after controlling for socio-economic status and several other subjective and objective measures of health.