South Africa 1993-2015 Post Apartheid Labour Market Series

The Post Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS) 1993-2015 dataset is an OHS, LFS and QLFS stacked cross sectional dataset created by DataFirst at the University of Cape Town. The dataset consists of microdata from 54 household surveys conducted by Statistics South Africa between 1994 and 2015, as well as the 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development conducted by the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) at the University of Cape Town. The Statistics South Africa surveys include the October Household Surveys from 1994 to 1999, the bi-annual Labour Force Surveys from 2000-2007, including the smaller LFS pilot survey from February 2000, and the Quarterly Labour Force Surveys from 2008-2015. The data is at individual level, but household level variables can be created using the household id variable uqnr. No attempt has been made to link individuals or households across waves, although there was a panel element to the earlier rounds of the LFS, as well as the QLFS. There are currently over 120 variables in the dataset and over 5 million observations, including children and the elderly..

The data used was collected by Statistics South Africa and was obtained from DataFirst at the University of Cape Town. There are currently over 60 variables in the dataset and over 3.7 million observations, including children and the elderly. The variables included are mainly those to do with the labour market, although some household variables, such as dwelling type and access to services, as well as access to government social grants, are also included.

The naming of variables and value labels for the LFSs was done using code from David Lam at the University of Michigan. A similar structure was employed to code the OHSs. The do files and csv files which do this naming and labelling have also been made available from DataFirst's website.