Employment monitoring

Focus areas

	Evidence-based employment scenarios		Employment monitoring
	Macro-economy, economic bias & employment		Employment-oriented industry studies
	The informal economy		Government employment creation programmes
	Labour markets and social policy		Migration
	Regional dynamics		Social dialogue
	Employment policy network		Food Security, Agriculture and Rural Development

A range of labour and economic statistics are produced by a plethora of sources – they cover firm-level surveys, household surveys, population censuses, trade union data, industry databases and UIF reports, amongst others. These different data sources often approach the measurement of employment  from differing stances.  While they all contribute towards our knowledge of employment issues, it is no simple task to build up a coherent picture of employment from these disparate and sometimes conflicting sources. 

Currently, this includes the following project areas

• Tracking employment trends
• A review of employment statistics. This work is a collaborative effort, bringing together major users and experts such as Stats SA, COSATU, the Reserve Bank, the National Treasury, the Office of the Presidency, the Department of Labour, the Department of Trade and Industry and others.  A reference group from these Departments, Statistics SA, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) was formed to review the first major output, focusing on a realistic assessment of employment trends between 1996 and 2003

Planned projects

• We aim to develop analytical indicators that would tell us where the economy is relative to employment and unemployment targets.
• Tracking government budgets