How much income mobility was there in South Africa between 2008
and 2012? Did this mobility serve to equalise or disequalise longer-term measures
of income? In this paper we address the first question by assessing the extent of
absolute and relative economic mobility. We then turn our attention to the second
question of the joint relationship between mobility and inequality, and implement
a new measure that is designed to reveal just how equalising or disequalising mobility
has been. We find that there was a lot of absolute and relative mobility in
the period covered by the first three waves of NIDS, and that this mobility served
to equalise longer-term incomes slightly.