Aspects of South African state welfare policy : a study in public finance and income redistribution
International redistribution studies vary in scope from those which investigate the full range of all benefits and costs of the fiscal system to others restricting their coverage to the distributive impact of a single expenditure or tax. In South Africa relatively little research has been directed to the distributive consequences of state spending and taxing policies. The few existing studies have mainly concentrated on race as an explanatory variable in analyzing budget incidence. This thesis adopted a new technique of measuring the incidence of benefits obtained from state spending and the burdens imposed by tax payments. The first step involved constructing household-level microdata files for sample households. Secondly, allocation routines were developed for selected expenditures and taxes whereby the benefits and costs of fiscal action could be assigned to households. Lastly these routines were applied separately to the files of each household. The distributive effects of the expenditures and taxes could then be analyzed with respect to any relevant household variable.
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