South African Social Accounting Matrices for 1993 and 2000

Two South African social accounting matrices (SAM) are described in this paper and are built on the framework originally presented in Thurlow and van Seventer (2002). The first section provides a general overview of the structure of SAMs. The second section reviews the process and data sources used to construct the South African SAMs. An important component of the SAMs is their detailed treatment of household income and expenditure drawing on household surveys. The third section describes how imbalances in the household accounts are removed using cross-entropy estimation techniques. Finally, the fourth and fifth sections review the manipulation of the household surveys to derive household incomes and expenditures.