Class, Race, And Inequality In South Africa

by Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass

• ISBN13: 9780300108927
• ISBN10: 0300108923
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2005-12-14
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the "distributional regime." The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.

Author Biography

Nicoli Nattrass is a professor in the school of economics, University of Cape Town.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Authors' Note	p. ix
Introduction: States, Markets, and Inequality	p. 1
South African Society on the Eve of Apartheid	p. 49
Social Change and Income Inequality Under Aprtheid	p. 90
Apartheid as a Distributional Regime	p. 128
The Rise of Unemployment Under Apartheid	p. 165
Income Inequality at Apartheid's End	p. 188
Social Stratification and Income Inequality at the End of Apartheid	p. 236
Did the Unemployed Constitute an Underclass?	p. 271
Income Inequality After Apartheid	p. 300
The Post-Apartheid Distributional Regime	p. 340
Transforming the Distributional Regime	p. 376
Notes	p. 401
References	p. 405
Index	p. 439
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