First, this paper seeks to estimate the extent of racial employment, occupational and earnings discrimination in the late 1990s. The preliminary step is thus to identify the determinants of the labour market outcomes of interest, namely the probability of employment, the occupational attainment, and the earnings. The following stage is to explore the extent to which the race gaps respectively observed in the probability of getting a job, of reaching a high-skilled occupation and in average earnings are due to the African group’s inferior productive characteristics and to labour market discrimination. The paper is based on econometric estimates that adapt, whenever it is necessary, the residual difference method of decomposing group wage differences (Oaxaca, 1973) to discrete choice models.

It focuses on two population groups, African and White males. The second aim of the paper is to analyse how these three forms of discrimination evolved after the end of apartheid. For this purpose, we use two household surveys, namely the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) and the 1999 October Household Survey (OHS). In doing so, this paper expands the field of investigation and the period covered by previous studies focusing only on racial wage discrimination (Knight and McGrath, 1987, Moll, 1991 andThe analysis below proceeds as follows. Section 1 outlines the methodology used in the remainder of the paper and its limits. Section 2 investigates the extent of racial discrimination in the access to the labour market. It first estimates the determinants of employment and then concentrates on the measurement and evaluation of discrimination between 1993 and 1999. Similarly, sections 3 and 4 consider occupational and earnings discrimination respectively. Conclusions are drawn in section 5.