Small Area Indices of Multiple Deprivation in South Africa

This paper presents the Provincial Indices of Multiple Deprivation that were constructed by the authors at ward level using 2001 Census data for each of South Africa’s nine provinces. The principles adopted in conceptualising the indices are described and multiple deprivation is defined as a weighted combination of discrete dimensions of deprivation. The methodological approach used is outlined and key findings are presented for one province—the Eastern Cape. The paper summarises the ways in which the research is being developed further and the potential uses of these tools for policy and research.     

Poverty,Inequality and Deprivation in South Africa: An Analysis of the 1993 SALDRU Survey

This paper analyses poverty and inequality in South Africa based on data from a comprehensive multi-purpose household survey undertaken in 1993 to provide baseline statistics on poverty and its determinants to the new government. The paper shows that South Africa has among the highest levels of income inequality in the world and compares poorly in most social indicators to countries with similar income levels. Much of the poverty in the country is a direct result of apartheid policies that denied equal access to education, employment, services, and resources to the black population of the country. As a result, poverty has a very strong racial dimension with poverty concentrated among the African population. In addition, poverty is much higher in rural areas, and particularly high in the former homelands. Poverty among female-headed households and among children is also higher than average. Moreover, poverty is closely related to poor education and lack of employment. The poor suffer from lack of access to education, quality health care, basic infrastructure, transport, are heavily indebted, have little access to productive resources, and are heavily dependent on remittances and social transfers, particularly social pensions and disability grants. The paper uses an income-based definition of poverty for most of the analysis. In addition, it develops a broad-based index of deprivation including income, employment, wealth, access to services, health, education, and perceptions of satisfaction as its components. While on average the two indicators correspond fairly closely, the income poverty measure misses a considerable number of people who are severely deprived in many of the non-income measures of well-being. This group of severely deprived not identified by the income poverty measure consists predominantly of Africans living in rural areas, concentrated particularly in the province of KwaZulu/Natal.     

Financial Sector Development Indicators and Economic Growth in Cameroon and South Africa

This study seeks to identify, compare and appreciate salient differences in the financial sector development and economic growth experiences of Cameroon and South Africa. A comparative study is often conducted in the early stages of development of a branch of science in order to help research to progress from the initial level of exploratory case studies to a more advanced level of general model invariance, such as causality. Furthermore, a comparative study can also help in understanding the root cause of the development and/or weakness of one system (economy). A comparison between the financial sectors of Cameroon and South Africa will help to identify whether or not the level and structure of a financial sector can explain differences in terms of the effects of the latter on economic growth. The paper first compares the economic growth experiences of Cameroon and South Africa and examines the development of their financial sector. This is to assist in understanding their economic situations, in order to acknowledge the experiences of the two countries, which may explain the nature of the development of their financial sectors. The paper then analyzes the further development of their financial sectors using various indicators of financial deepening. This is to evaluate how all the policies implemented in order to restore the economic situation in these countries have impacted on their financial sector, either in terms of the number of players (financial widening), or in terms of their efficiency (financial deepening). Implications and conclusion are then included. It has been suggested that in Cameroon, during the pre-reform period, the country as well as the financial sector, excelled the most, partly due to the discovery of oil in 1978. However, the mid 1980s economic shock experiences of Cameroon significantly affected the financial sector. Subsequent financial sector development policies of Cameroon have failed to improve the economic situation. In the post-reform period, the banking sector was unable to efficiently collect savings and allocate these to the economy, possibly because of the loss of confidence in the banking sector although few efforts were made to attract savings from the economy. Furthermore, real interest rate, which reflects the real cost of funds to the borrower and the real yield to the lender, was almost negative throughout the period under review, and did not attract savings, even when it was positive. For South Africa, throughout the period under review, there has been a trend of an increase in almost all the indicators of the financial sector development selected. Savings have been better mobilised and effectively allocated to the economy and the financial sector has done well since the liberalisation of the sector.     

Social Deprivation and Rural Public Health in China: Exploring the Relationship Using Spatial Regression

Social Indicators Research - Rural public health still faces serious challenges in China. These challenges in rural public health reduce peasants’ well-being and social satisfaction....     

Area Deprivation and Liver Cancer Prevalence in Shenzhen,China: A Spatial Approach Based on Social Indicators

Cancer has become an alarming threat to human health and well-being worldwide. Examining the social determinants of cancer prevalence should effectively inform the practices and strategies on cancer treatment and prevention. However, rather few studies have conducted in this regard for developing countries. This paper attempts to characterize the association between area deprivation and liver cancer prevalence using a case of Shenzhen, China. Data from 2009 to 2011 provided by Shenzhen’s Health Information Center are used to calculate the incidence rate of liver cancer at district level. An area deprivation index (ADI) at district level is established by integrating 13 indicators of 5 domains (income, employment, education, housing and demography). The weight for each indicator is determined by two typical subjective methods (AHP and fuzzy AHP) and two common objective methods (Entropy and Coefficient Variation). Quantitative comparisons indicate that the four methods are highly consistent though they assign different weight to the indicators. Spatial lag regression identifies significantly positive linear relationships between ADIs and liver cancer incidence rate from 2009 and 2010. It suggests that greater possibility of liver cancer prevalence would be expected in districts of higher social deprivation. The results also denote that the obtained relationships are insensitive to weight determination method and temporal dimension. Our study demonstrates that spatial autocorrelation should be incorporated for better understanding the association between area deprivation and liver cancer prevalence at district level. This paper provides some new insights into social indicators research.     

Area Social Deprivation and Public Health: Analyzing the Spatial Non-stationary Associations Using Geographically Weighed Regression

The prevalence of non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) worldwide poses an alarming threat to public health. Recent literature has embraced the opinion that incorporating the social factors should advance the understanding of NCDs prevalence. In this context, examining the NCDs prevalence in association with area social deprivation should provide critical implications for coping with public health risks. However, few empirical studies have examined this specific issue, especially in the developing countries. Using the principal component analysis, an area social deprivation index (ASDI) is established for the Shenzhen city (China) by integrating ten indicators from four dimensions: education, housing, socially disadvantaged population, and economically disadvantaged population. The geographically weighted regression (GWR) is employed to analyze the associations between ASDI and the incidence rate of three prevalent NCDs at district scale. Spatial non-stationary relationships are identified for the three diseases. More specifically, prevalence of the three diseases is all positively correlated with the ASDI. Strength of the associations presents the geography that it generally decreases from the central city to the suburb. These findings suggest that greater possibility of NCDs prevalence would be expected in districts with higher social deprivation. Besides, the impact of social deprivation on NCDs prevalence is much stronger in the central city. The spatial stationarity can facilitate the formulation of location-specific preventive measurements. This paper is believed to provide an innovative insight for social indicators research.     

Quality of Life in Europe: Objective and Subjective Indicators A Spatial Analysis Using Classification Techniques

Social Indicators Research -     

Monitoring Perceptions of the Causes of Poverty in South Africa

This study explored how people perceive the causes of poverty. Literature revealed that there are three broad theoretical explanations of perceptions of the causes of poverty, namely individualistic explanations, where blame is placed squarely on the poor themselves; structural explanations, where poverty is blamed on external social and economic forces; and fatalistic explanations, which attribute poverty to factors such as bad luck or illness. To examine South Africans perceptions according to these dimensions secondary analysis was employed on one of the Human Sciences Research Council’s (HSRC) national representative client surveys. Approximately 3,498 respondents across South Africa were surveyed between 18 April and 30 May 2006. The bivariate analysis revealed that South Africans in general attribute poverty to structural over individualistic and fatalistic dimensions of poverty. Ordinary least square regressions revealed that these perceptions of poverty interacted with a host of socio-demographic and economic variables such as race and peoples’ lived experiences of poverty. In this regard, all three ordinary least square regressions showed that lived poverty had a significant impact in predicting respectively structural, individualistic and fatalistic perceptions of the causes of poverty. The second regression predicted individualistic perceptions and showed that being white was the most significant predictor. The third regression predicted fatalistic perceptions and established that being coloured was the most significant predictor.     

Quality of Life in the Gauteng City-Region,South Africa

The core challenge facing South Africa after it became a democracy in 1994 was twofold: to meet the basic needs of (black) people denied these by apartheid, and simultaneously restoring dignity and undoing the psycho-social damage of racist white rule. This article analyses the first two in a planned long-term sequence of quality of life surveys in the Gauteng City-Region, the economic power-house of South Africa, with Johannesburg at its centre. The survey gathers data across multiple objective and subjective indicators. The key challenge is to try and understand the interplay between the two—and thus what impact, if any, meeting basic needs has on the psycho-social profile of residents of the city-region. The conclusion is that the impact is limited: objective indicators, which largely measure delivery of goods and services by government, drives the quality of life index up; but social, community and individuated indicators (such as anomie and alienation) pull scores down, and most particularly so for older, low educated black South Africans. The future may look positive for those born after apartheid; but for those who sacrificed their education in the struggle to topple the regime, the future looks like ‘more of the same’. Education emerges as the key asset that allows black South Africans to overcome the damage of apartheid; lack of (or low levels of) education do the reverse; this is true of both socio-economic advancement and social attitudes.     

Religiosity and quality of life in South Africa

Using nationally representative survey data, this paper explores the relationship between religiosity and quality of life. Three indicators of religiosity are used: (i) frequency of attendance at religious services or meetings, (ii) orthodoxy of beliefs in relation to Biblical teachings and (iii) religious denomination. Quality of life (QoL) is measured in terms of (i) household access to modern conveniences, (ii) self-assessed life satisfaction and (iii) level of satisfaction with government institutions. The data shows a significant but not very strong statistical relationship between religiosity and QoL. People who attend religious meetings most frequently and who hold the most orthodox religious views are thus more likely to have access to modern conveniences and to be satisfied with their lives. Satisfaction with government, however, tends to be highest amongst nominally religious people and lowest amongst both the most orthodox and the least religious.     

Playing Numbers Or Politics? Approaches to the Prioritisation of Development Needs in South Africa

This paper uses a case study to highlight the implicit political and developmental assumptions which underpin an indicator and index based prioritisation of developmental needs. A key issue for the successful implementation of development objectives in South Africa is the identification and prioritisation of development needs. Indicators could play an important role in terms of informing the decisions made by various levels of government. An indicator based index supported by a computerised system called the Development Indicators Monitoring System (DIMS) has been used to prioritise housing and service provision need within the province of Gauteng. The article shows that the prioritisation of areas in terms of service need is sensitive to the index construction method employed. It is argued that various choices around the index construction method depend on certain developmental assumptions which are fundamentally political choices. In particular, the choice between absolute and relative indicators of need has a considerable impact on the prioritisation of areas. However, this is not a total rejection of the use of indicators in the planning process. Rather, it is a call for the appropriate use of the tools that are available.     

Family Instability and Pathways to Adulthood in Cape Town,South Africa

Social, political, epidemiological, and economic forces have produced family instability during childhood for many young people transitioning to adulthood in South Africa. This study identifies pathways to adulthood for youth in Cape Town that capture the timing and sequencing of role transitions across the life domains of school, work, and family formation. It then uses these pathways to investigate the relationship between childhood family instability and the way young people's lives unfold during the transition to adulthood. Results indicate that changes in co‐residence with parents are associated with following less advantageous pathways into adulthood, independent of particular family structure or orphan status. Overall, the findings suggest that family instability influences not only single transitions for youth, but also combinations of transitions. They also indicate the value of a multi‐dimensional conceptualization of the transition to adulthood in empirical work.     

Measuring and understanding the well-being of South Africans: Everyday quality of life in South Africa

South Africa has a Gini co-efficient of 62, one of the world’s highest (Finmark: Project FinScope 2004 and 2005, FinMark Trust, Johannesburg). Hence, measures of wealth are ubiquitous social indicators in South Africa. However, a growing emphasis in government towards measurable service delivery targets and remedial action to redress the inequalities of our past makes the reliable measurement of people’s quality of life in greater depth in quantitative terms an imperative.We have developed a simple framework to measure people’s quality of life in key domains that extend beyond that simply of wealth, using composite indices to allow progress to be tracked and to make valid comparisons across our diverse population. Termed the Everyday Quality of Life Index (EQLi), it comprises a suite of measures encompassing socio-economic status (with special reference to poverty), urbanisation, health (nutrition, exercise and fitness), stress/pressure, quality of the environment, satisfaction of human needs, connectivity, optimism, subjective well-being (happiness, after Diener and Lucas: 2000, in M. Lewis, J.M. Haviland (eds.), Handbook of Emotions. (2nd ed) (Guilford, New York)), and the overall measure of well-being, the EQLi itself.The initial framework was developed from a structured questionnaire administered to a probability sample of 2000 South African adults in 2002. From this, a 52-item shortlist was derived to create the series of measures. This has been tested and refined in three subsequent annual studies, each of 3500 people across urban and rural South Africa. In 2004, items involving work as well as determining the balance of skills and challenges at work using the concept of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi: 1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper and Row, New York)) were added.This paper outlines the rationale behind the selection and development of these measures, describes the EQL of South Africans using these and other key measures and concludes with implications for policy-makers and service providers in South Africa. Some marketing implications are also given: there is a growing emphasis worldwide on corporate social investment initiatives and, particularly in South Africa, on community upliftment and development – poverty alleviation and improving the lives of the disadvantaged (“people” rather than “consumers”). Further, people’s well-being affects how they react to marketing activities.     

Quality of Life in South Africa: Post-Apartheid Trends

During the apartheid era black South Africans indicated markedly lower levels of happiness and satisfaction in all spheres of life than their white counterparts. The gap between black and white subjective well-being closed temporarily after the first universal franchise elections held on April 27, 1994 only to widen again eighteen months later. The paper presents data on subjective well-being collected during the 1980s and 1990s in four nationwide cross-sectional attitude surveys and a multipurpose household survey. Possible explanations for the shifting levels of happiness are explored. These include levels of living, income inequality, rising expectations and new anxieties experienced in the post-apartheid era.     

Mapping Patterns of Multiple Deprivation and Well-Being using Self-Organizing Maps: An Application to Swiss Household Panel Data

The aim of this paper is to propose multidimensional measures of deprivation and wellbeing in contemporary Switzerland, in order to overcome the limitations of standard approaches. More precisely, we have developed self organising maps (SOM) using data drawn from the 2009 Swiss Household Panel wave, in order to identify highly homogeneous clusters of individuals characterized by distinct profiles across 44 indicators of deprivation and well-being. SOM is a vector quantiser that performs a topology-preserving mapping of the k-dimensional input data to a two-dimensional, rectangular grid of output units, preserving as much as possible the information contained in the original input data. “Topology-preserving” means that, when an SOM is properly developed, units that are close in the output space are also close in the input space. Our results suggest that the SOM approach could improve our understanding of complex and multidimensional phenomena, like those of well-being, deprivation, vulnerability, that show only a partial overlapping with standard income poverty measures.     

Using Child and Family Indicators to Influence Communities and Policy in Los Angeles County

This article presents a case study on the use of social indicators to guide community action and influence policy decisions around children and families in Los Angeles County California. Since the early 1990s, the Children's Planning Council has incorporated strategic use of data in all of its planning and community organizing. The Council has developed a unique set of strategies for using social indicators, in combination with large-scale organizing, to convene stakeholders, change perceptions and influence decison-making. The article describes the Council, the theoretical framework that guides its approach to data, key issues that have guided its information strategies, and the challenges that still lie ahead.     

Surviving the Transition: Trends and Perceptions of Crime in South Africa

Crime and violence have dominated South Africa's transformation over the past two decades. High crime rates cause widespread feelings of insecurity and fear which undermine popular confidence in the democratisation process. Considering both trends and public perceptions, this paper explores changing crime levels over the past decade, elaborating on the problems associated with crime statistics in South Africa, and the salience of the transition for current crime levels. Data is drawn from official police statistics and from victimisation and other surveys. Crime has been increasing gradually in South Africa since 1980. It is, however, since 1990 and not more recently as is popularly believed, that levels have risen sharply. An examination of the statistics shows that despite general increases, not all crimes have been committed with equal frequency and not all areas of the country are similarly affected. These trends are a product of the political transition and are associated with the effects of apartheid and political violence, the breakdown in the criminal justice system and more recently, the growth in organised crime. High crime levels are taking their toll on South Africans. Surveys show that crime rather than socio-economic issues now dominates people's concerns, and that fear of crime is increasing. Currently, fewer people feel safe and believe the government has the situation under control than in previous years. Faced with widespread unemployment on the one hand, and the prospects of development on the other, levels of property crimes will probably continue to increase. While violent crime levels should decline over the medium term, improved relations with the police and a culture of reporting crimes like rape and assault may result in more crime being recorded.     

Using Quality of Care Indicators to AssessFamily Planning Program: Xuanwu,Nanjing

Tilequalityofcareprogramwaslaunchedill1997inXuanwuDistrict,Nalljing,JiangsuProvincecenteringoilone-stopreproductivehealtllservices.Witlltheunfoldingoftheprogram,theDistrictFamilyPlanningCommissionadopted11ewappraisalindicatorsin1998tofacilitateprogress.DemographicsAreaf81squarekmPopulatiollf389,000Womenofreproductiveagef105,000Marriedwomellofreproductiveagef76,000BackgroulldTwoKAP(knowledge,attitudeandpractice)surveyswerecollductedbytheNalljillgFamilyPlanllingCommissiOllill1996and1997…