What is it about?
What are the empirical patterns and significance of private non-market transfers between family members living in separate households? By transfers, I'm referring to help that people give to their family members who don't reside in the same household as them. Such help includes, money, food, and other important things that improve life. Most people consider this as either merely an obligation or simply charity, but it goes way beyond and into territories of human existence that we are only beginning to understand. We needed to explore these territories in order to assist policymakers in designing social and economic policies that allow for better distribution of public programmes, and illuminate the extent to which social objectives are being met privately. In doing so, I analyze the behavior of support (financial and in-kind) between familial-related individuals living in separate households.
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Why is it important?
Many struggling families have been left to their own instruments both by the state and market alike. As such, they have been reduced to "survival by any means necessary". However, there is a third way: Familial relationships. This important coping mechanism has been long neglected in both academic discourse and state social policy legislations. Here, I present its nuances and conclude that if this issues is not taken into consideration when determining the welfare position of families, the results of such a determination will always be erroneous. For interfamily transfers ameliorate the effects of income reduction (or complete lack thereof) as may be related for instance to, unemployment, physical incapacitation, divorce, and other negative shocks. Ultimately, I submit that interfamily transfers in South Africa fill a welfare gap so fundamental that public policies that reconcile familial bonds in general, and motivate benevolence in particular are recommended.
Perspectives
My evidence indicates that inter-family support (transfers) respond to income and vulnerability indicators, and constitute a sizeable portion of total incomes. Therefore, I submit that these transfers are likely serving both consumption smoothing and income equalization purposes. Ultimately, the magnitude of these transfers suggest that measurements of income distribution which do not include transfer receipts are likely to be biased. In a nutshell, financially vulnerable households are surviving in many undocumented ways. support from kin is not just one of these ways but is the main pathway through which this group cope with risk. More so, I find in my sample that the incomes for net recipients of familial support was a lot higher than the combinations of the incomes they received from other sources.
Dr. Ralph Abbey Ssebagala
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Plugging the Welfare Gap: The Role of Kinship Transfers in South Africa, The Journal of Development Studies, December 2020, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2020.1850698.
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