1 Regional workshop for African countries Admin Data in South Africa Statistics South Africa 16-19...
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Transcript of 1 Regional workshop for African countries Admin Data in South Africa Statistics South Africa 16-19...
1
Regional workshop for African countries
Admin Data in South Africa
Statistics South Africa16-19 October 2007
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Legal Framework For Co-ordination
• The Statistics Act (No. 6 of 1999) defines the role of the Statistician-General both as the coordinator of national statistics nationwide and as the developer and enforcer of statistical standards
• South African Cabinet approved the National Statistics System (NSS) in Jan 2002
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Partnerships
• Education• Reserve Bank• Home Affairs• Dept of Agriculture• Minerals and Energy• Labour• Trade and Industry• South African Revenue Service
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Co-ordination of Economic Statistics
Important Supply side co-ordination with
• Reserve Bank ( National Accounts and Selected Surveys)
• South African Revenue Service ( Business Register)
Other players: • Trade and Industry ( Systems of Registrations) • Labour ( UIF)) • Municipalities ( Financial Data for Government
Accounts)
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SARS
• 1999 – Amendment to tax law to allow Stats SA to access all tax records
• Independent Business Register ( co-operation of 4 government departments)
• Data Quality uneven • Most important admin data – SARS – VAT
data• Key challenge – single business identifier
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Key Objectives of BR
• Reliable data for estimating movements and levels
• Data to estimate GDP • BR more challenging when it comes
to estimating employment owing to lack of a single business identifier
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Status Quo Pre Business Register
• Economic statistics dependent on a business register to develop sampling frames.
• Last economic census carried out in 1996• Business Address Register – A business
population built up from various censuses • Implications: from day one it became out
of date and decayed rapidly• How to compensate for new businesses
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Improvements as a result of the Business Register
Under the BR- there is a continuous updating of births.
However, we do not have a source for deaths. The problem with the BAR – dead from day 1 while
the BR is alive.The BR is built on the statistical units model –
enterprises and kind of activity unit and a local unit.
In practice, this is not very rosy. We have large businesses poorly profiled.
In sum: BR is alive and a units model underpinning it.
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Prerequisites for transferring from the Business
• Effective revenue service (strengthened in SA)
• Inhibiting issue is to resolve a number of sources ( match and clean inconsistencies in sources)
• No unique number and you get two sources- you soft match.
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Challenges
• the lack of a unique identifier for each business when engaging with different government spheres
• enterprises have completely different and independent numeric identifiers in the systems for IT, Skills Development Levy (SDL), Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), PAYE and VAT.
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Challenges
• Introduction of a wage remuneration as a stratification variable despite the absence of a single business identifier
• The most serious challenge – is business profiling – large firms in South Africa as complex as you can get.
• Effective survey feedback
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Challenges
• Trade off between sustainability and coverage
• cannot fiddle around with coverage year to year as you have breaks in your series
• No administratively induced surprises ( amnesty)
• Business below the VAT threshold- reliance on income tax source – basic information on turnover