Poverty

Using the Income and Expenditure Surveys of 1995 and 2000, and an institutional poverty threshold, Statistics South Africa reported that both poverty and inequality may have increased (Stats SA, 2002). However, the South African government argues that poverty is multi-dimensional, and that access to services has the effect both of improving the well-being of poor households, and also of reducing their exclusion or vulnerability to adverse relations of inclusion. May and Woolard (2005) show that from the perspective of basic service delivery, the gap between the poor and non-poor has narrowed in the post-apartheid era although it must be cautioned that these results do not comment on the quality of the service, or on whether the supply of the service has been disconnected.