In a polarised and highly unequal country such as South Africa, it is unlikely that a definition of the middle class that is based on an income threshold will adequately capture the political and social meanings of being middle class. We therefore propose a multi-dimensional definition, rooted in the ideas of empowerment and capability, and find that the 'empowered middle class' has expanded significantly since 1993 also across vulnerable subgroups such as blacks, female-headed households and rural inhabitants. It also is much larger than when measured in terms of income. Differing trends between the middle class defined based on income and based on capabilities is attributed to improved capabilities have not been rewarded with a proportional increases in access to the labour market. It is disconcerting that links to the labour market improved only slightly and this is attributed to sluggish labour market growth and low quality of education.
We find that the middle class tend to have lower expectations around social mobility than the vulnerable. It is concerning that vulnerable individuals harbour unrealistically high expectations of the social mobility of the households and do not understand the determinants of social mobility and labour market prospects –possibly due to a mixture of heightened expectations following the political transition, but also the continued disconnection and marginalisation of vulnerable subpopulations from the mainstream economy.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.