South Africa is ranked one of the most unequal societies in the world. The Conversation Africa spoke to Imraan Valodia, the Director of the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, about inequality in South Africa.
Has income inequality got worse in the last 20 years?
According to the most recent data, South Africa has the highest income inequality in the world, with a Gini coefficient of around 0.67. The Gini coefficient is a widely used statistical measure of how income is distributed in the population of a country. It takes a value between 0 and 1. A coefficient of 1 indicates perfect inequality – where one individual in a country would earn all the income in that country. Conversely, a coefficient of 0 is an indicator of perfect equality, where the income of the country is distributed perfectly equally among all its citizens.
