46 CHAPTER 3


they incur additional transportation and time costs. Accordingly I explore the impact of apartheid on the spatial distribution of quality education under the post-apartheid regime, in which spatial mobility is legally unrestricted.4 This chapter asks how historical and location factors affect access to qual- ity education in post-apartheid South Africa through the use of a unique data- base combining the 2002 school census and the Community Profile Database from the 2001 South African census. With the addition of GIS information, these data enable us to identify the location of a given school and to corre- late that with local socioeconomic characteristics.


Given the abovementioned spatial dependence, the role of government subsidy is expected to be significant in creating equitable and equal access to education. I assess to what extent government subsidy disconnects the linkage between local resources and school quality, given that school fee determines school quality. For this purpose, I use school finance data from the province of KwaZulu-Natal to analyze the dependence of school quality, measured by the LER, on school fee and government subsidy. Selod and Zenou (2003) examined the role of school fees in screening children from different backgrounds in a spatial model, showing that whites tend to overprice education in order to limit the numbers of African learners. It is likely that a high school fee supports high school quality even in South African public schools, as well as keeping the community and schools racially homogeneous. This chapter also provides some insight into this question. The chapter is organized as follows. The section “Dependence of School Quality on Local Resources” discusses how school quality (inputs) can depend on local resources in South Africa. The following section describes the empiri- cal framework and data used in the analysis.


Empirical results are summarized in the next section. First, some key spatial features of school fee distributions and population group compositions in South Africa are demonstrated and linked with the history of apartheid. School fees are significantly higher among formerly non-African schools and in predominantly white areas.


Second, while local population-group composition and former apartheid departments of education still influence the way in which school fees (and thus school quality) are determined for local public schools, the role of local income opportunity is also significant, especially in large cities. Third,


4 Chapter 2 examined how LERs changed between 1996 and 2000, splitting the sample into for- merly African, white, colored, and Indian/Asian schools. I showed that the change in the num- ber of educators in response to a change in the number of learners is smaller in formerly African schools than in formerly white schools. This finding implies that the former group has been more likely to face financial constraints.


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