"From a policy point of view it is important to flag the fact that intra-African [black] inequality and poverty trends increasingly dominate aggregate inequality and poverty in South Africa," noted the report, Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty since the Fall of Apartheid. "While between-race [black, white, coloured or mixed-race, and Indian] inequality remains high and is falling only slowly, it is the increase in [black] intra-race inequality which is preventing the aggregate [inequality] measures from declining," the authors commented.
The demise of apartheid in 1994 left a skewed racial economic hierarchy that placed whites firmly at the top, followed by Indians, coloureds, and then blacks. Since then the African National Congress (ANC) government has made Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) a policy centre-piece, but by the party's own admission it has failed to improve the lot of the vast majority of black South Africans. "We also have to admit that the 'broad-based' part of BEE has seemed elusive.
