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The South African existing literature on poverty mainly adopted the money-metric approach to examine poverty levels and trends since the advent of democracy. In general, poverty increased until the end of the 1990s, before a downward trend took place. Despite the robust findings on the trends, poverty levels differed because of various reasons, ranging from the use of different poverty lines across the studies, to the adoption of different approaches to collect the income and expenditure information, and the presence of a high proportion of households reporting zero or unspecified income. This article aims to fill the existing research gap by explaining the possible factors accounting for the contrasting poverty levels across the eight commonly used South African censuses and household surveys between 1993 and 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]