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The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview

Author

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  • Wittenberg, Martin

    (DataFirst, University of Cape Town)

  • Pirouz, Farah

    (DataFirst, University of Cape Town)

Abstract

Earnings questions have been asked in South Africa's national surveys annually since 1994. A key question for labour economists has been to track and explain the evolution of earnings over this post-apartheid period. Unfortunately, however, the measurement instrument has changed in ways that make it tricky to simply take the raw figures and compare them even if one restricts the attention to the October Household Surveys and the various Labour Force Surveys. In this paper we analyse some of the changes and indicate where corrections are needed. We implement many of these changes in the second release of PALMS, the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (Kerr, Lam and Wittenberg 2013). The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 2 we review studies done on the earnings variables in the national surveys from Statistics South Africa, particularly those that comment on the comparability of the variables over time. In Section 3 we pay attention in more detail to the evolution of the measurement instrument. We then turn to an analysis of the actual responses in section 4 with a view to pinpointing where the underlying measurements may have changed. The following sections deal with ways of handling bracket information and missing data respectively . In section 8 we look at the impact of these data quality adjustments on the estimation of average real earnings over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Wittenberg, Martin & Pirouz, Farah, 2013. "The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview," SALDRU Working Papers 108, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
  • Handle: RePEc:ldr:wpaper:108
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Nicola Branson & Martin Wittenberg, 2014. "Reweighting South African National Household Survey Data to Create a Consistent Series Over Time: A Cross-Entropy Estimation Approach," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 82(1), pages 19-38, March.
    2. Reza C. Daniels, 2012. "Questionnaire Design and Response Propensities for Employee Income Micro Data," SALDRU Working Papers 89, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    3. Claire Vermaak, 2012. "Tracking poverty with coarse data: evidence from South Africa," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 10(2), pages 239-265, June.
    4. Johane Dikgang & Nomsa P. Nkosi, 2016. "Are South African consumers arm-chair environmentalists? Implications for renewable energy," Working Papers 94, Economic Research Southern Africa.
    5. Sylvain Weber, 2010. "bacon: An effective way to detect outliers in multivariate data using Stata (and Mata)," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 10(3), pages 331-338, September.
    6. Rebecca R. Andridge & Roderick J. A. Little, 2010. "A Review of Hot Deck Imputation for Survey Non‐response," International Statistical Review, International Statistical Institute, vol. 78(1), pages 40-64, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Serena Merrino, 2020. "Measuring labour earnings inequality in post-apartheid South Africa," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2020-32, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    2. Martin Wittenberg, 2017. "Measurement of earnings: Comparing South African tax and survey data," SALDRU Working Papers 212, Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town.
    3. Wittenberg, Martin., 2014. "Analysis of employment, real wage, and productivity trends in South Africa since 1994," ILO Working Papers 994847703402676, International Labour Organization.
    4. repec:ilo:ilowps:484770 is not listed on IDEAS

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    Keywords

    earnings; PALMS; the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series;
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