Who Is Falling Behind? Is AIDS-Related Mortality Contributing to Increased "Income" Mobility in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa?

Alessandra Garbero, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
Victoria Hosegood, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
Ingrid Woolard, University of Cape Town

The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between “income mobility” and AIDS-related mortality in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As Woolard and Klasen (2005) highlight, income mobility is strongly linked to demographic and employment dynamics. In this paper, we advance existing literature by disaggregating mobility by demographic and economic events: we specifically estimate the contribution of AIDS-related mortality to such mobility and investigate the specific role of such demographic determinants. Income mobility is a controversial concept. We adopt the view of Fields and Ok (1996):“income” is defined as any “real-valued measure of socioeconomic position (consumption) among any well-defined recipient unit (e.g. households)”. We analyse single- and two-stage absolute mobility measures constructed with expenditure data. This is particularly relevant as underlying the root cause of poverty in the province is a skewed pattern of class-based income mobility (Carter and May 2001).