South African Poverty indicators 1996 - 2001 Municipalities: All provinces

Description:
This is aggregated data of individuals or households. The data originates from the South African censuses of 1996 and 2001 and covers the whole country at a municipal level. In order to calculate the aggregate poverty gap a cross tabulation of household income by household size, municipality and population group was drawn from the 2001 census.

The poverty gap of each poor household was summed to arrive at the aggregate poverty gap for each municipality.
Abstract:
New estimates of poverty show that the proportion of people living in poverty in South Africa has not changed significantly between 1996 and 2001. However, those households living in poverty have sunk deeper into poverty and the gap between rich and poor has widened. The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in collaboration with Mr Andrew Whiteford, a South African economist, has generated these estimates.

Approximately 57% of individuals in South Africa were living below the poverty income line in 2001, unchanged from 1996. Limpopo and the Eastern Cape had the highest proportion of poor with 77% and 72% of their populations living below the poverty income line, respectively. The Western Cape had the lowest proportion in poverty (32%), followed by Gauteng (42%).

While the poverty rate measures the proportion of a region’s population living below the poverty line it does not give any indication of how far below the poverty line poor households are. For this the HSRC has used a measure called the poverty gap that measures the required annual income transfer to all poor households to bring them out of poverty. The HSRC study has shown that the poverty gap has grown from R56-billion in 1996 to R81-billion in 2001 indicating that poor households have sunk deeper into poverty over this period.

In order to calculate the aggregate poverty gap a cross tabulation of household income by household size, municipality and population group was drawn from the 2001 census.

The poverty gap of each poor household was summed to arrive at the aggregate poverty gap for each municipality.

The Gini coefficient is a summary statistic of income inequality which varies from 0 (in the case of perfect equality where all households earn equal income) to 1 (in the case where one household earns all the income and other households earn nothing).