The South African Reserve Bank today released the 8th edition of Labour Market Frontiers in Pretoria. The publication addresses broader socio-economic and labour-market issues in order to develop a holistic, more integrated knowledge base and policy perspective. This volume presents 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 of approximately 30 000 households.  The first article attempts to construct a time series of comparable wage data for the period 1995 to 2005 using available household survey data. The authors find no clear evidence of either an increase or a fall in real wages in the informal sector. They do however; find evidence that earnings in the formal sector have risen slightly in real terms since 1994. The rise in average formal-sector earnings is driven by an increase in the earnings of skilled workers as the earnings of unskilled and semi-skilled workers have remained flat over the period. The gap in earnings between men and women initially widened during the period reviewed, but seems to have narrowed since 2000.  The second article uses a variety of measures to investigate wage inequality by occupation, sector, race and gender. The authors show that South Africa continues to be 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.  The final article compares labour-market earnings in the public sector relative to the private sector. The author finds that the degree of wage dispersion in the public sector is much lower than it is 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.  For further enquiries Dr Johan van den Heever(012) 313 3625