Technical Assistance Course 2004                           

Analysis and Measurement of Poverty and Inequality

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The DPRU presented its second Technical Assistance Course on the Measurement and Analysis of Poverty and Inequality between 22 March and 2 April 2004. The course was presented for the national Department of Social Development.

The two-week course took place in Pretoria. Ravi Kanbur (Cornell University), Steve Younger (Cornell University) and Paul Cichello (Xavier University) lectured on the course for the second time. Ching-Mei Chen, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, also assisted for a few days during the practical sessions. The DPRU staff involved in the course were Haroon Bhorat, Laura Poswell and Mornéé
Oosthuizen.

As part of our aim to build research capacity in South Africa and to enable participants to better integrate poverty and inequality concepts into their work, approximately 30 participants were drawn primarily from the Department of Social Development. Individuals from the National Treasury and the Human Sciences Research Council also attended the course. The course included formal lectures on assigned readings. Practical computer-based exercises, using the statistical software package STATA, was applied to draw on the readings and lectures. The course aimed to provide participants with both the theoretical foundations of poverty and inequality measurement and more practical knowledge of how to derive these measures from national household survey datasets.