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Slowing union formation and rapid household formation in South Africa

Amy Thornton, University of Cape Town
Martin Wittenberg, University of Cape Town

In South Africa, average household size shrank by almost a full person between the 1996 and 2011 censuses as households were formed at about twice the rate that the population grew. Economic conditions in post-apartheid South Africa have been challenging; characterised by high rates of unemployment, continued poverty, and extreme income inequality. The question of why South Africans would form more and smaller households under these conditions is a provoking one. The econometric literature on South Africa has focused on the labour market channel, but in this paper we specifically incorporate marriage. South African marital rates have been declining persistently for decades, whilst co-habitation and divorce remain rare. We model household formation in South Africa using a reweighted stacked series of annual cross-sectional household surveys between 1995 and 2011 and include an interaction between marital and labour market status. Borrowing from labour economics, we then apply an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to our model. An acceleration in the rate at which never-married people are forming households emerges as a key result. We suggest that high rates of male unemployment have destabilised the marriage market, thereby interrupting traditional household gender specialisation and resulting in structural change in how people form households.

Keywords: Decomposition analysis/methods, Gender, Family demography

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P15.