The data used for our analysis is drawn from the first four waves of the National Income Dynamic Study to determine the factors that influence poverty and household welfare in South Africa. Contrary to most existing studies, which have applied ordinary least squares and probit/logit models on cross-sectional data, this analysis captures unobserved individual heterogeneity and endogeneity, both via fixed effect, and via a robust alternative based on random effect probit estimation. The results from fixed effect and random effect probit indicate that levels of education of the household head, some province dummies, race of the household head, dependency ratio, gender of the household head, employment status of the household head and marital status of the household head are statistically significant determinants of household welfare. Consistent with previous research, we also found that, compared to traditional rural areas (used as reference category), households living in urban and farms are less likely to be poverty stricken, which implies that rural areas (traditional rural areas) should continue to be a major focus of poverty alleviation efforts in South Africa.

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Educational reforms and curriculum transformation have been a priority in South Africa since the establishment of the Government of National Unity in 1994. Education is critical in redressing the injustices of apartheid colonialism which created an inequitable and fragmented education system. Factors such as school access, governance, curriculum, teacher deployment and financial resources have also gone through the education policy mill. While relatively impressive progress is observed regarding legislative interventions, policy development, curriculum reform and the implementation of new ways of delivering education, many challenges remain. Key among the challenges relates to the quality of education, twenty two years since the dawn of democracy. To contribute to the debate on educational reforms and pertaining to the quality of education, the paper discusses the various curriculum reforms of South Africa’s education sector and provides a brief evaluation of the trends in policies affecting equity and quality in the South African education environment. The paper finds that the quality of education is critical for many reasons

Investigating the remittance-financial development relationship is an ongoing endeavor among economists and policy makers. Building and improving on the existing work, this study considers the possibility that the relation between remittances and financial development is potentially asymmetric. This study applies the linear ARDL and captures the possibility of an asymmetrical relationship by applying the non-linear Autoregressive Model (NARDL). Using NARDL, an attempt is made to estimate the short-run and long-run asymmetric responses of financial development through positive and negative partial sum decompositions of changes in remittances. To assess the robustness of the ARDL and NARDL estimates, a battery of long-run robustness tests were employed, including the linear and nonlinear versions of the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS). Annual data series from 1980 to 2017, derived from the World Development Indicators, Fred Economic data and Penn World Tables were used for this study. The ARDL results reveal a positive and significant impact of remittances on financial development, whereas NARDL estimations suggest a both positive and negative shock of remittances on financial development in the long run: a percentage (%) increase in the remittances brings about 0.121568 percent increase in financial development, whereas a one-percent decrease in remittances produces a 0.33363 percent decrease in financial development.