Public assets and services delivery in South Africa: Is it really a success?

Abstract

Poverty alleviation remains a pressing concern for South African policy-makers. Implementing effective anti-poverty policies requires a clear understanding of the nature and extent of poverty. The extant literature on South African poverty dynamics shows a decline in the headcount ratio over the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, the prior research largely adopts a narrow money-metric approach, or uses multi-dimensional indices that include welfare indicators based on private assets (e.g. television sets) or those that are provided publicly (e.g. access to water). This paper uses multiple correspondence analysis to measure non-income poverty trends for the period 2005–12. The novelty in this undertaking lies in an attempt to include a measure of the perceived quality of public assets and services to complement the standard indices. This provides some measure of ‘success’ of public service delivery, accounting for both changes in access and quality.

Keywords:

• poverty
• public assets
• public services
• multiple correspondence analysis
• General Household Survey
• South Africa

JEL Classification:

• I32
• O10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0376835X.2015.1063986

Notes

⁴Even though different poverty lines were used in past studies, they indicated a decline in poverty rates. For example, Bhorat & Van der Westhuizen (2012) found that poverty rates declined when comparing the Income and Expenditure Surveys of 1995 and 2005. They used the R174 and R322 per capita per month (2000 prices) poverty lines.

⁵Both Atkinson (2007:58) and Alexander (2010:32) allude to the fact that poor-quality service delivery is one of the factors associated with an increase in service delivery protests since 2004.

⁶The variable connoting the municipal district of observations was discontinued in 2007, which restricts geographic and administrative comparisons to the provincial level. The urban/rural designation variable was also omitted in surveys between 2004 and 2012, again constricting the analysis from areas germane to the South African poverty landscape.

⁷This section is merely descriptive of the method. See Greenacre (1984), as well as Blasius & Greenacre (2006) – from whom this section borrows extensively – for a more formal and comprehensive exposition.

⁸CA is applied in the analysis of two-variable datasets.

⁹Person weights are used in the data analysis.

¹⁰‘Best’ refers to the top level of each category. For example, in the case of dwelling, ‘formal’ would be a better type of asset than ‘informal’.

¹¹In this case, the best category refers to ‘very good’ and/or ‘good’ quality.