South Africa Wealth Inequality Unchanged Since Apartheid – Report

South Africa‘s wealth inequality has remained unchanged since apartheid.

Gatekeepers News quotes a report by World Inequality Lab, a research group focusing on the study of income and wealth distribution worldwide, as saying the social architecture formed during more than three centuries of white-minority rule has maintained South Africa’s position as the world’s most unequal society.

Efforts by the now-democratic government to clear the legacy of apartheid and colonialism have failed to narrow the inequality between the rich and the poor.

The report released this week noted that 3,500 adults own more than the poorest 32 million people in the country of 60 million.

“There is no evidence that wealth inequality has decreased since the end of apartheid,” the Thomas Piketty-backed group said.

“Asset allocations before 1993 still continue to shape wealth inequality.”

In the late 1940s, during colonialism and structured apartheid, black South Africans were mostly denied economic opportunities.

More than a quarter of a century of democratic rule has led to the growth of a black middle class and a black business and political elite.

To date, most South Africans suffer from a poor education system that leaves them ill-prepared for jobs, while townships, built for blacks during apartheid, leave them far away from workplaces.

Dissatisfaction with economic outlooks and an unemployment rate of more than 30 percent has stoked unrest in Africa’s most industrialised economy. That in turn restricted development and reduced investment.

According to the group, laws ranging from affirmative action to mandating minimum black-owned stakes in businesses have done little to narrow inequality.

“South Africa’s successive governments endorsed several ambitious socioeconomic policy frameworks whose primary objectives consistently included reducing economic inequality inherited from colonial and apartheid regimes,” it said.

“Yet wealth inequality has remained remarkably stable.”

Gatekeepers News quoted the report as saying the richest 10 percent of the population in South Africa owns more than 85 percent of household wealth, while more than half the population have more liabilities than assets.

The group said the gap is higher than in any other country for which sufficient data is available.

As blacks have outnumbered whites in the richest 10 percent of the population for about seven years, the World Inequality Lab data noted that the gap between South Africa’s richest and poorest has not narrowed.

This, according to the report, is because the decline in racial inequality is being driven almost entirely by a surge in the top black incomes rather than increased wealth for the poorest.