The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview
| dc.creator | Wittenberg, Martin | |
| dc.creator | Pirouz, Farah | |
| dc.date | 2013-10-03T09:23:11Z | |
| dc.date | 2013-10-03T09:23:11Z | |
| dc.date | 2013-09 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2015-05-28T10:06:24Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2015-05-28T10:06:24Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015-05-28 | |
| dc.description | Introduction: 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. | |
| dc.description | We acknowledge the support of an infrastructure grant to DataFirst from the Redi3x3 project on “Employment/Unemployment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth". The Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Fund of the University of Cape Town paid for the initial construction of the PALMS dataset without which this research would not have been possible. | |
| dc.identifier | 978-1-920517-49-6 | |
| dc.identifier | http://hdl.handle.net/11090/638 | |
| dc.identifier.ris | TY - Working Paper DA - 2015-05-28 DB - OpenUCT DP - University of Cape Town KW - Earnings KW - Post-Apartheid KW - Palms KW - Labour Market LK - https://open.uct.ac.za PB - University of Cape Town PY - 2015 T1 - The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview TI - The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11090/638 ER - | en_ZA |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11090/638 | |
| dc.language | en | |
| dc.publisher | Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit | |
| dc.publisher.department | SALDRU | en_ZA |
| dc.publisher.faculty | Faculty of Commerce | en_ZA |
| dc.publisher.institution | University of Cape Town | |
| dc.relation | SALDRU Working Paper;108 | |
| dc.subject | Earnings | |
| dc.subject | Post-Apartheid | |
| dc.subject | Palms | |
| dc.subject | Labour Market | |
| dc.title | The measurement of earnings in the post-Apartheid period: An overview | |
| dc.type | Working Paper | |
| uct.type.publication | Research | en_ZA |
| uct.type.resource | Working Paper | en_ZA |