The pandemic basically wiped out all the progress Black business owners in South Africa had made since apartheid ended.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
When Crisis Meets Discrimination: Difference-in-Differences Evidence on Racial Wage Penalties in Post-COVID South Africa
SSRN · 6452938
The Takeaway
While workers faced penalties, Black business owners suffered a staggering 59% relative earnings loss compared to other groups. This suggests that in unequal societies, the 'entrepreneurial ladder' is significantly more fragile during a crisis than established institutional wealth.
From the abstract
South Africa entered the COVID-19 pandemic with one of the world's most unequal labor markets, where racial stratification shaped not only employment access but the distribution of wages within employment. This paper estimates the differential effect of the post-2020 period on monthly wages using seven waves of the Labor Market Dynamics in South Africa (LMDSA) dataset spanning 2017 to 2023. The empirical strategy employs a difference-indifferences design with race-by-post-2020 interaction terms,