Diploma Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 75%, course: Bachelor of commerce honours Economics, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this study was to determine whether, between 1998 and 2018, income inequality in Southern Africa had an effect on human development. The current study focuses on analyzing, using Quantec Easy data, how income disparity (as assessed by the Gini Coefficient) affects development (as measured by the HDI) in South Africa. To determine co-integration and whether there is a long-term connection between income disparity and human evolution, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was employed in conjunction with the Error Correction Model (ECM). The series' stationarity, which is a mixture of I(0) and I(1), was one of the factors that led to the selection of the ARDL model.