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| dc.contributor.author | Wittenberg, Martin | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2017-10-13T12:22:56Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2017-10-13T12:22:56Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017-10 | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Wittenberg, M (2017). Measurement of earnings: Comparing South African tax and survey data. Cape Town: SALDRU, UCT. (SALDRU Working Paper Number 212) | |
| dc.identifier.isbn | 978-1-928281-73-3 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11090/896 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Comparing earnings in the tax assessment data to those in the QLFS, it appears that earnings of employees in the QLFS are underreported by perhaps 40%, with bigger gaps near the top of the distribution. Benefits and annual bonuses contribute substantially to the gap. In the case of self-employment incomes it is also the case that high earnings are missing or underreported in the QLFS, but the tax data seems to miss many mid- and low-income self-employed earners. These differences make sense when one considers the incentives for reporting accurately to SARS versus to Statistics South Africa. These errors mean that earnings inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient is probably underestimated in the surveys by three percentage points. | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | I would like to thank REDI3x3 for funding this research and for giving me access to the data. Many thanks to Elizabeth Gavin for talking me through some of the intricacies of the data. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments. Ingrid Woolard, Kezia Lilenstein and Andrew Kerr provided useful feedback on some parts of this work. None of them are responsible for any errors in the analysis. The financial assistance of the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3) is acknowledged. Findings, opinions and conclusions are those of the author and are not to be attributed to said research Project, its affiliated institutions or its sponsors. This research report was first published in October 2017 as Working Paper 41 of the Research Project on Employment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth (REDI3x3), funded by the South African National Treasury and based at SALDRU, University of Cape Town: www.redi3x3.org | en_US |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | Saldru Working Paper;212 | |
| dc.title | Measurement of earnings: Comparing South African tax and survey data | en_US |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en_US |
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