Enriching economics in South Africa: interdisciplinary collaboration and the value of quantitative – qualitative exchanges

Abstract

Since the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, economic research and instruction in South Africa have become far more quantitative and technically sophisticated. In this paper, I trace and discuss reasons for these developments, and I argue that this quantification of economics should not be at the expense of exchanges with qualitative data that fail the criterion of being representative, or with other disciplines that are less quantitative. With South Africa’s complex history, persistent inequality and considerable cultural diversity, economics has much to gain from interdisciplinary collaboration and mixed methods research.

Keywords:

• South African economics
• methodological trends
• household survey data
• qualitative data
• mixed methods

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Luiz and Ingrid Woolard for their helpful comments on the paper, and to Don Ross, and to the CoE Human (University of the Witwatersrand), for their support of my research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, the 1951 and 1960 Censuses treated men living in the former homelands as employed (as a ‘peasant farmers’) if they were of working age and another occupation was not specified, but women in the same position were classified as ‘housewives’ and therefore as not economically active. However, the next census, conducted in 1970, classified women other than the wives of the male household head as employed as peasant farmers, leading to a dramatic increase in the number of employed female Africans between 1960 and 1970 (Knight, 1978; Posel & Casale, 2001).

2. The precursor to this journal, which was published from 1925 to 1932, was the Journal of the Economic Society of South Africa.

3. For example, these fields dominate in the list of all papers appearing in the journal from 1933 to 1992, published in the South African Journal of Economics (1993) according to the classification system from the Journal of Economic Literature.

4. Although we could not test the mechanisms of this relationship using cross-sectional data, we suggested that pension income received by women specifically may be important partly because it helps prime-age women overcome income constraints to migration, and also because it makes it possible for grandmothers to support children in the absence of their mothers.

5. According to data from the most recent Population Census of 2011, only 39 percent of African women (18 years and older) were ‘ever-married’ (currently married, divorced or widowed), compared to over 67 percent of other women. From 1995 to 2011, rates of ever-marriage declined by 13 percentage points among African women, compared to a decline of two percentage points among Indian and Colored women and eight points among white women.

6. The study analysed the Labour Force Survey Panel (2001–2004), a rotating panel of individuals, and showed that among African employed men, a robust and positive premium to marriage in cross-sectional estimations is substantially reduced after controlling for individual fixed effects. Furthermore, African men with faster earnings growth in the initial periods of the panel were more likely than other African men to have married by the end of the panel (Casale & Posel, 2010).

7. Participants were identified through a combination of opportunity and snowball sampling. For more details see Posel and Rudwick (2014a).

8. In 2008, for example, the majority (77 percent) of African mothers who were never-married were also not cohabiting with a partner, compared to 41 percent of white never-married mothers (Posel & Rudwick, 2013).