Some are getting richer

Some are getting richer

The global financial crisis has hit some and put them under but many are actually doing better than ever before.

Business Report tells us of a new bit of research carried out by the Bureau of Market Research (BMR) which is attached to UNISA. They were looking at income and expenditure patterns and found that there had been a whopping 52.1% increase in the number of South Africans earning more than R750 000 a year to around 187 000 people.

This compares to the lower growth by less than half that (25.8%) in folks earning between R550 000 to R750 000 to 253 000 people.

These are great figures none the less as more people are making more money, so something is going right in the economy.

Apparently it was expected that there would be a sharp contraction in the number of people earning less than R50 000 a year, but this did not happen and that sector only shrank by 0.8% to 23.3 million people.

This is the majority, by far, of our workforce and they are earning less than R 4200 a month. However the data apparently shows that there was not much migration from the lower bands to higher bands, but rather the people in the higher bands were moving up and the lower bands were remaining static.

The lead researcher used something known as the Gini coefficient, which is measure of wealth distribution. The closer to zero the more equal is the distribution of wealth.

The data shows that our Gini Coefficient is 0.67, which sounds ok, until you look at the scale, it can only be between 0 and 1.

That means we have a pretty unequal distribution of wealth.

Fin24 also looked at this story. In their article they worked out that the people making more than R 750 00 equates to only 0.6% of our population older than 16 years.

They said that the lead researcher noted that the high inflation rate from last year was not taken into account that the number of poor people has probably increased.

These income bands that are referred to are generally structural in that you need to get into or out of various sectors of the economy in order to make more money.

Those earning less than R 50 000 a year are often not in the formal economy, and it is very hard for them to break through and get more bucks.

For those who want to earn more than R 650 000 a year apparently up to 60% are self-employed entrepreneurs.

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