Introduction: what was the purpose of the South African Minimum Income Standards pilot study?

The Minimum Income Standards (MIS) approach was pioneered in the UK (see Davis et al, 2018), and although it has been shown to work well in this and other high-income countries (e.g. France [Gilles et al, 2014; Gelot, 2016] and Portugal [Ferreira Correia et al, 2016]), its applicability in a developing country context has until relatively recently been unexplored. South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world (Sulla and Zikhali, 2018), with entrenched racial and spatial divisions that are proving difficult to break down, resulting in concurrent yet very different standards of living. The starting point for the South African pilot of the MIS approach, as in all countries where the MIS approach has been applied, was a simple but fundamentally important question: what exactly do people need in order to have an acceptable standard of living? Understanding what standard of living the public regard as acceptable or decent is clearly important for government, businesses, civil society, trade unions and other organisations. Indeed, the South African government's National Development Plan provides ‘a framework for the adoption of a minimum standard of living by society’ and acknowledges the need for a clear definition of what this entails (National Planning Commission, 2014).

The aim of the pilot, presented here, was to ascertain whether South Africans can reach agreement both about how a decent standard of living is defined and what constitutes this decent standard of living – or how the agreed living standard is described. Consequently, it was important to explore whether the MIS approach was viable in this context using a small pilot study in the first instance. This chapter discusses some of the methodological challenges that arose during the design and implementation of the pilot which required modifications to the MIS approach as implemented in the UK, to better fit the South African context. The findings of the pilot study are then presented alongside recommendations for an expanded nationwide study.

The MIS pilot in South Africa was not the first attempt to explore the idea of consensus around socially determined living standards.

Introduction

The Minimum Income Standard (MIS) approach was developed in the UK (Davis et al, 2018a), as a way of researching and establishing what is required for a minimum socially acceptable standard of living, both in terms of the goods and services which comprise a minimum ‘basket’ and the income needed to provide this. For a decade (Davis et al, 2018b), annual MIS updates have captured and reported public consensus about minimum living standards, establishing a publicly defined threshold – or standard – below which it is agreed that individuals and households would not be able to meet all of their minimum needs (Stone et al, 2019). This consensual budget standard approach is built on the premise that minimum living standards are socially and culturally specific (Walker, 1987; cf. Townsend, 1979), and that the definition and description of what constitutes a minimum living standard should privilege public consensus rather than the assessments or opinions of experts, policy makers or government (Davis et al, 2018a).

Alongside its development in the UK, the MIS approach has to date been applied in eight other countries. In France (Gilles et al, 2014; Gelot, 2016), Ireland (Mac Mahon et al, 2018), Japan (Davis et al, 2012) and Portugal (Ferreira Correia, 2016) the MIS approach has been adopted and applied in order to establish a minimum standard of living for a wide range of individuals and households types. It has been applied to establish the needs of specific demographic groups in Thailand (families with young children) and Singapore (older people). Two other countries – Mexico (Valadez-Martínez et al, 2017 and South Africa (Byaruhanga et al, 2017) – have run pilot MIS studies to establish whether it is possible to reach public consensus about minimum living standards in unequal and divided countries, and in Mexico a full study is now underway. The experience of disseminating the MIS approach across these countries has been that, following Townsend (1979) and Walker (1987), each conceives of and describes a minimum in a way that reflects the values, norms, characteristics and priorities of its own society.