Living Standards Measure

{{Short description|Marketing and research tool}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}

{{more citations needed|date=May 2017}}

The Living Standards Measure or LSM is a marketing and research tool ( same as social economic class: SEC but more refined ) used in South Africa to classify standard of living and disposable income. It segments the population into ten deciles based on their relative means, with LSM 1 being the decile with the least means and 10 being the decile with the greatest means. It does this by ranking people based on ownership of the components of a standard basket of goods (which varies over time). For instance, those people who owned a television set would rank higher in the LSM than those who did not.{{cite web|title=Living Standards Measure|url=http://www.saarf.co.za/lsm/lsms.asp|website=South African Audience Research Foundation|accessdate=20 December 2016}}

In effect, the LSM is an income inequality metric, despite specifically excluding income as one of the tested metric.{{cite magazine|first=Werner|last=Ruch|title=Measuring poverty in SA|magazine=The Fieldworker|publisher=Stats SA|date=July 2014|volume=5|url=http://www.statssa.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Fieldworker-Low-Res-June-2014.pdf|accessdate=20 December 2016}} Its components are reflective of the fact that South Africa has a high Gini coefficient.{{cite web|title=South Africa Overview|url=http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/southafrica/overview|website=The World Bank|accessdate=20 December 2016}}