The Economics of Households in South Africa

This chapter first provides a brief historical review of household formation and its disruption during the apartheid decades. It then uses national micro-data (1995–2018) to describe broad changes in household formation since the democratic transition. Among these trends, the chapter highlights a sizeable increase in household formation and a decrease in average household size, associated partly with a rise in single-person households and a fall in fertility rates. Gendered living arrangements have also changed considerably as the share of households with a co-resident couple has fallen. Specifically, the growth of households where all resident adults are either female or male has far exceeded overall household formation, and the share of children living only with their mother has risen apace. However, households also continue to be stretched to include members who live elsewhere for much of the year. The chapter then sketches the variation in economic resources across different household types, highlighting changes in recent decades.

DETERMINANTS OF WEDDING CONSUMPTION IN INDONESIA

Marriage unites man and woman in a sacred bond to which economic theories may apply. The economics of marriage includes the analysis of household formation and break up, as well as production and distribution decisions within the household. Marriage usually involves the arrangement of wedding ceremony. Nonetheless, consumption spending on wedding ceremony may differ for each household, depending on their personal preferences. On that account, this study aims to examine the determinants of wedding consumption in Indonesia, which include household income, age, sex, educational attainment, area of residence, and financial literacy level of the household head. This study uses regression method to analyze expenditure data from the National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas) in 2016. Our findings show that income, age, sex, education, and financial literacy have a significant effect on wedding consumption. This finding has important implications for governments to support the effort to improve financial literacy, especially among couples who are interested in marriageKeywords: Wedding Reception and Ceremonies Expenditures, Marriage Economics, Financial Literacy.JEL: D140, G390, G290

Tenement Size and Social Structure: Reflections on Chepstow in 1901

This interdisciplinary study focuses on tenement (house) size, as recorded in the census in 1901, to explore demographic and social contrasts in Chepstow, an historic market town and river port in south-east Monmouthshire. For three contrasting enumeration districts, it contextualises this measure of housing status against the characteristics of the built environment, and applies the technique of house repopulation to derive spatial patterns of social difference and inequality from residents' age, household formation, net lifetime migration, and employment circumstances in the stagnating local economy. The study re-scales the investigative methods used by urban historians in city-wide studies of urban ecology and demonstrates how tenement size, a crude but under-utilised measure of housing stock, can support micro-scale studies of social differentiation in small but regionally significant towns. Equally as important, it provides an insight into the case-specific processes and particular outcomes of urbanisation during the nineteenth century in rural Monmouthshire.