Abstract
This paper examines the impact of a large social regime change on well-being independently from the change’s direct impact on observable outcomes. While individuals get utility from outcomes, they may also get ‘procedural’ utility from the processes by which outcomes arise. We apply a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to models of life satisfaction before and after the end of apartheid. The results suggest that the increase in life satisfaction seen in South Africa following apartheid’s end should not be attributed to improvements in socioeconomic outcomes, but to changes in the well-being derived from given levels of these outcomes. This suggests that processes and institutions have important impacts on life-satisfaction independently from their direct influence on outcomes.
| Original language | English |
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| Pages (from-to) | 735-749 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Journal of Development Studies |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Funding
We use data from representative cross-sectional household surveys conducted in South Africa in 1993 and 1998. The earlier survey was conducted by the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Capetown and supported by the World Bank’s Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (South Africa Labour Development Research Unit, ). A sample of approximately 9,000 households was surveyed in late 1993. The 1998 data are from Statistics South Africa’s October Household Survey, conducted each year from 1995 to 1999 (Statistics South Africa, ). Slightly less than 20,000 households were surveyed. We use the data from 1998 because they provide the largest temporal gap from 1993 for which the majority of variables, particularly the life satisfaction reports, are comparable to the 1993 data. We would like to thank Richard N. Barrett for motivating this paper, Meredith Walker for outstanding research assistance, Jonathan Graham, participants in the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit seminar series at the University of Cape Town, participants in the Micro Group lunch series at the University of Oregon, two anonymous referees, and the journal editor for useful comments. The data construction documentation and Stata do files for data construction and analyses are available from the authors upon request along with supplementary tables.
| Funders |
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| University of Oregon |