Recent studies on poverty trends in South Africa suggest that poverty increased in the 1990s,
before a continuous downward trend took place after 2000. This study augments the income
and expenditure-based literature by examining poverty trends using household assets and
services. We consider numerous private assets, household service variables, and educational
attainment in order to derive a non-income welfare index. Principal components analysis
(PCA) is used to create an asset index and investigate the changes in non-income welfare
across household income quintiles between 1993 and 2010. The results indicate large and
statistically significant decreases in poverty, where the extent of this decline is more significant
in the poorer quintiles and among female-headed households.