This study contributes to the body of work on welfare in South Africa by addressing three different aspects of economic mobility. The first of these is about how a particular kind of measurement error in household surveys is best detected, and what effect its presence has on the understanding of labour market mobility. The second is about how best to model money-metric poverty dynamics in South Africa in order to better understand who escapes poverty and who enters poverty over time. The third is about how the persistence of intergenerational earnings should be calculated in a society with high unemployment, and what the role of education is in shaping these mobility dynamics.