Developing a spatial measure of exposure to socio-economic inequality in South Africa

Abstract

It is well documented that South Africa has high levels of poverty, deprivation and income inequality and, additionally, high levels of violent crime and social unrest. Debates about the drivers of social problems such as violent crime have shifted internationally and locally from a focus on poverty to a focus on inequality. However, there is very little empirical evidence to quantify this relationship in South Africa due, in part, to a lack of suitable measures of socio-economic inequality and, in particular, spatial measures of inequality at a detailed geographical level. In the international literature, measures of small area-level spatial inequality have generally been expressed in terms of residential segregation. We use Massey and Denton's five dimensions of residential segregation as our starting point, and assess their appropriateness as measures of spatial socio-economic inequality for the South African context. Focusing on their dimensions of ‘exposure’ and ‘clustering’, we develop a measure of spatial inequality which, we argue, can be described as a geographical measure of the ‘lived experience of inequality’ in that it reflects people's likely exposure to inequality as they go about their daily lives. Our final measure takes the form of a deprivation-adjusted local distance-weighted exposure index.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• poverty
• inequality
• residential segregation
• neighbourhood

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Benjamin J. Roberts, Hangwelani Hope Magidimisha, Helen Barnes, David Manley and Chris Lloyd for their many helpful comments during the preparation of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. In addition to applying these judgement criteria, the authors empirically tested indices located within each of Massey and Denton's five dimensions at a small area level, but these are not presented here in this study.

^2. Note that the term ‘k’ in the context of ‘k nearest neighbours’ is not related to the term ‘K’ in the context of the distance weights presented in the distance-weighted exposure indices.

^3. In the SAIMD, people are classified as suffering income and material deprivation if they meet any one of the following criteria: (1) living in a household that has a household income (need-adjusted using the modified OECD equivalence scale) that is below 40% of the mean equivalent household income; (2) living in a household without a refrigerator; or (3) living in a household with neither a television nor a radio.

^4. For instance, take the highly deprived suburb of Bloekombos, which is located on the periphery of the City of Cape Town municipality, close to the eastern border with Stellenbosch municipality. Based upon our methodology, a resident of Bloekombos has the potential to be exposed to socio-economic inequality in his/her own home neighbourhood, plus in every other neighbourhood across the City of Cape Town municipality (stretching from the very northern-most area around Atlantis (around 40 km from Bloekombos, to the very southern-most tip at Cape Point (approximately 60 km from Bloekombos)), plus a portion of the Stellenbosch municipality that falls within 20 km of Bloekombos (including the town of Stellenbosch itself, which lies approximately 15 km from Bloekombos).

Additional information

Funding

This publication was supported by a Pathfinder grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number RES-238-25-0026].