Poverty and Inequality can be addressed in different ways

Examples

Pay in South Africa Oct 31 st 2012 White South Africans still take home six times more pay than their black counterparts, 18 years after the end of apartheid and despite the incomes of black households surging 169 per cent in the past decade, the country's latest census has disclosed. The survey, the first in 10 years, showed that despite a fast-growing black middle class boosted by employment laws designed to redress historic imbalances, there are still major disparities between the overall education and income levels of South Africa's different races. South African President Jacob Zuma hailed the results as "the tale of our national pride," pointing to the halving of numbers of those living without basic services such as water, sanitation and electricity across the country since But he conceded that much more needs to be done. "These figures tell us that at the bottom of the rung is the black majority who continue to be confronted by deep poverty, unemployment and inequality, despite the progress that we have made since 1994," he said. According to the census, black people now make up nearly eight in 10 of the 51.8 million population. Fewer than one in 10 is white. Only 35 per cent of black people under the age of 20 passed their final exams at high school, compared with 76 per cent of the white population. Among black people aged 15 to 64, 35 per cent were employed compared with 69 per cent of the white population. Overall, household incomes more than doubled in the past 10 years. The average stands at about $11,900, up from $5,600 in But white households earned on average about six times more a year than black households, $42,200, despite the fact that black households have on average more people living in them, and despite an increase in the average black salary of 169 per cent. In a 2006 survey of incomes, white households were shown to earn 7.5 times as much as black households. Analysts estimated that at the same rate of development, it would take until 2061 for black and white families to bring home the same salaries.