104 CHAPTER 5


Chapter 1, this tendency reflects current labor-market conditions in South Africa, where the unemployment rate is high, particularly among the young. It is important to note that making the transition from school to the labor mar- kets does not necessarily mean that individuals are employed in those markets. In the analysis that follows, I examine adolescents’ transitions from education to the labor force, including both employment and unemployment. Second, the transition from school to the labor force occurs in a relatively similar manner for both men and women. In South Africa gender gaps in schooling investment and in labor markets are relatively unimportant. The 1998 data contain seven adolescents whose activities were not classi- fied as either labor market or school. Since the number of observations in this group is small, I decided not to show them in the table. The analysis in the next section also excludes this group, as inclusion of them in a multinomial logit analysis makes the estimation unstable. In the next section I provide empirical results on the impact of prime-age adult death on adolescents’ decisions to continue with schooling or to enter the labor market.


Empirical Results: Adolescent Transitions to Labor Markets I use prime-age adult mortality as a measure of AIDS-induced mortality shocks to households in the analysis of adolescents’ transitions from school to labor markets. An alternative method is to use parental death. These choices are not exclusive, but they could shed light on different aspects of AIDS-related mortality.


In our sample, I had 408 cases of prime-age adult mortality (defined for


ages 15–64). Among the children aged 14–19 who were residing in the sample households in 1998, 43 children lost their mothers during the interval 1998– 2004, and 60 lost their fathers.10 The number of children who had already lost their parent(s) before 1998 is not included in these figures, so the number of orphans is greater. A total of 362 children experienced prime-age adult mortal- ity in their households.11


In this chapter, though I focus on the impacts of prime-age adult mortality, it is also interesting to examine the impacts of parental deaths and compare the results. As discussed in the previous section, the literature seems to confirm that a mother’s death has a significantly greater adverse impact on


10 The numbers of children who lost their mothers and fathers are 35 and 46, respectively, if


we restrict the sample to ages 15–64. 11 During the period 1998–2004, 444 children experienced deaths in their households. Of these, 125 children experienced the loss of working prime-age adults. There were 18 cases of deaths among the children aged 14–19. These cases are not included in the panel data, so we are examining the effects on other siblings. This sample is small relative to the total sample of chil- dren aged 14–19.


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