PROVIDE Project Technical Paper 2005:1
however, also useful to show the earning and spending capacity and expenditure patterns of
South African households (SSA, 2002a). The survey is also based on the same sample of
households interviewed for the twice-yearly LFS (SSA, 2002b), which contains more detailed
information pertaining to employment activities of household members.3 This proves to be
quite useful as the IES 2000 and the LFS 2000:2 can be merged to form a comprehensive
dataset that combines the detailed household income and expenditure data of the IES 2000
with employment data in the LFS 2000:2.4
February 2005
The metadata file published with the IES 2000 provides a description of the data, the
sample design, the sampling weights and the variables contained in the dataset (SSA, 2002a).
The raw data are published in four ASCII text files with one line of given length per record or
observation. Each line represents a household or a person, depending on whether it is a
person- or household-level file. The first file, person.txt, contains person-level data of all
members in the household. The maximum household size allowed for is 25 members. This
file contains categorical and continuous variables for gender, age, race, work status and
income from employment of each household member. The inclusion of labour income data at
a person-level is a new addition to the IES 2000. Previously in the IES 1995 employment
information was not available at a person-level, which meant that data on occupation codes,
industry codes and labour income had to be extracted from the OHS 1995. Since this data is
now available in the IES 2000 there is the option of using only the IES dataset for all the sub-
matrices, including the factor-related sub-matrices. However, as argued in section 2.3, there a
number of reasons why it was decided to rather use the LFS 2000:2 data for all factor-related
information.
A second file, renamed domworker.txt, contains information on domestic workers
employed by households. In the PROVIDE SAM domestic work is regarded as a service
purchased by the household and supplied by an activity called domestic services, and hence
this information should also be extracted from the raw data. A third file, renamed
homegrown.txt, contains information on home production for home consumption (HPHC) of
farm produce and livestock at the household level. This information is included in the income
and expenditure sides of the applicable households and takes into account the market value of
goods produced, the amount consumed, and the value of excess production sold. Input costs
are also accounted for. Finally, general.txt contains all the general income and expenditure
PROVIDE SAMs. As a result expenditure items from the IES have to be mapped to the correct
commodity groups. This mapping is based on the mapping used by (McDonald and Punt, 2001) for their
SAM for the Western Cape province.
3 The LFS replaced the OHS, which was conducted annually until 1999.
4 Since the LFS 2000:2 and the IES 2000 were conducted at around the same time in 2000 Statistics South
Africa suggests that the September edition of the LFS be merged with the IES 2000.
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