Employment uncertainty in the era of COVID-19: Evidence from NIDS-CRAM and the QLFS

ABSTRACT

This paper conducts an analysis of employment uncertainty in South Africa during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, using NIDS-CRAM and five waves of Statistics SA's Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS: 2020-Q1 to 2021-Q1). We find that much of the differences in estimates of labour force states including employment, unemployment and not economically active, are due to different initial conditions and different reference periods between the two surveys, as well as the way that uncertain job attachment is measured in the questionnaires. This leads to higher estimates of employment in NIDS-CRAM compared to the QLFS for both a pre-pandemic baseline and over the entire period investigated (February 2020 to March 2021). This implies the two data sources are not strictly comparable, but rather complementary when analysing different aspects of the labour force. We discuss the implications for labour market research based on these data sources.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour market statistics
• questionnaire design
• labour force status determination
• COVID-19 lockdowns

JEL CODES:

• J21
• J23
• J63

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Earlier working paper versions of this paper have appeared as Daniels et al.,(2021a and 2021b).

2 The statistical power of the sample was communicated to the authors by the sampling team for NIDS-CRAM in email correspondence. It does not appear in the survey documentation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Endowment.