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South Africa lags behind among other developing and emerging market economies on business start-ups. Businesses that fail in a year is averaging between 50% and 60%, a figure quite high for a country struggling with achieving sustainable economic growth to reduce unemployment, inequality and poverty. This study identifies issues hurting SMMEs that need attention from both businesses themselves as well as from policymakers. The objective of this study is to identify key business success determinants using cross-sectional data that was randomly collected from informal businesses in Johannesburg/Pretoria in South Africa from 390 informal SMMEs. Using assets ownership as a yardstick for success in an ordered logistic regression, the study finds education status, income, employment growth, centre of operation, financial inclusion, experience, financial literacy and advertising budget were significant in explaining assets ownership (success) in South Africa. This study recommends that the government through its various institutions that deal specifically with small businesses come up with radical business training programmes so as to improve the finance literacy among small business. Also, small business owners should budget to fund their advertising budgets since it is found that advertising has a positive impact of firm success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing pool of evidence showing that cash transfers can promote livelihood activities. Yet there has been limited empirical studies that explore how financial support influences beneficiaries' decision-making in the construction and operation of livelihood activities in an urban context. This study presents findings from qualitative research conducted in a poor urban community in South Africa. Structuration theory provides an analytical tool to understand how cash transfers enable decision-making of beneficiaries in livelihood activities. The study finds that beneficiaries make different types of initial and ongoing decisions to improve their socio-economic condition. Among the contributions of this paper is that it counters the cynicism that is usually attached to cash transfers. The study's implications include the incorporation of both social and economic goals in the design of social protection policies as well as the need for greater recognition of the role of the informal economy in eradicating poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working poverty exists worldwide and has shown an increase in prevalence over the past few decades. Over the years, there has been an increase in the number and severity of low-wage employment, which in turn contributes significantly to poverty. Whilst paid employment has generally been considered as the predominant means to survive financially, salaries may be too low to maintain reasonable living standards. South African research on low-wage employment and working poverty in particular, are rare. Using data from the first four waves of the National Income Dynamics Study, this study fills the existing research gap by examining low-wage employment, working poverty, and low-wage poverty. The empirical findings indicated that all three groups are predominantly lowly-educated, middle-aged African female employees involved in elementary occupations in the informal sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with marginal populations affected by the ‘truncated agrarian transitions’ of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: people displaced out of land-based employment without reasonable prospects for accumulation in the non-farm economy. It analyses the forms of economic agency of people living in the migrant routes and networks connecting the shantytowns of Cape Town and the rural Eastern Cape in South Africa. It describes the artful and hybrid nature of their livelihood strategies – strategies that involve the integration from ‘below’ of urban and rural spaces, formal and informal income, and which simultaneously take shape outside the regulatory spaces conferred by the state,and make use of the rights and opportunities created by law and formality. Far from being reduced to the ‘outcast’ condition of ‘bare life’, marginalized and poor people in South Africa pursue inventive strategies on uneven terrain, cutting across the dichotomies of official discourse and teleological analysis. This allows a more nuanced analysis of the nature and specificity of the agrarian transition in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]