Previous volumes of Labour Market Frontiers have made useful contributions on important labour market topics such as rising female labour force participation, the changing pattern of employment and labour market churning. Given the high level of unemployment in South Africa, it is fitting that labour research should focus on the nature and dynamics of parti¬ci¬pation, employment and unemployment. Nevertheless, if the functioning of the labour market is to be fully explained, it is vital to also have an understanding of another key labour market variable, namely wages.  This volume presents some new research on the growth in wage levels and the distribution of wages in the South African economy. All three articles make use of data from Statistics South Africa’s biannual Labour Force Survey (LFS) of approximately 30 000 households. The LFS collects detailed labour market information for all persons over the age of 15 residing in these 30 000 households. It collects information on the earnings of the employed and the self-employed in all occupations and industries in both the formal and informal sectors. In addition, it is possible to distinguish in the data between private and public-sector employees.  The first article in this volume attempts to construct a time series of wage data for the period 1995 to 2005 using these household survey data. Naïvely considering a comparison of mean wages at the beginning and end of this period would lead one to reach the conclusion that real wages have been declining. However, the authors show that this conclusion would be incorrect. They carefully construct a series in which only comparable workers are retained and extreme outliers are discarded. They find no clear evidence of either an increase or a decrease in real wages in the informal sector. They do, however, find evidence that earnings in the formal sector have risen slightly in real terms over the post-apartheid period. The rise in average formal-sector earnings was driven by an increase in the earnings of skilled workers as the earnings of unskilled and semi-skilled workers remained flat over the period. The gap in earnings between men and women initially widened in the post-apartheid period, but it seems to have been narrowing since 2000. Similarly, the gap between White and African workers initially widened, but has been narrowing since 2003. The second article uses a variety of measures to investigate wage inequality by occupation, sector, race and gender. The authors show that South Africa is still characterised by huge wage inequalities, which manifest themselves along racial, gender, industry and education lines. Using a multivariate framework, the authors find that the racial gap in earnings narrowed between 2001 and 2005, while the gender gap widened. Holding everything else constant, they find that wages are lowest in the agricultural, construction and private household sectors and they are highest in the electricity, gas and water supply sector.  The third article in this volume looks at labour market earnings in the public sector relative to the private sector. The sheer size of the public sector – which employs one-fifth of formal-sector workers – makes it worthy of individual study. The author finds that the degree of wage dispersion in the public sector is much lower than in the private sector. This is because workers in unskilled occupations earn substantially more in the public sector than they would in the private sector, while the converse is true for highly skilled and managerial occupations. Thus, while the public sector pays better, on average, than the private sector, this is not the case at the upper end of the wage distribution. Most significantly, the wage reduction associated with being African, Coloured or female is substantially smaller in the public sector than it is in the private sector.  Income inequality is a key policy concern in South Africa. Given that about three-quarters of household income originates in the labour market, the distribution of jobs and the extent of wage inequality are major