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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the quality of data on household assets, liabilities and net worth in the South African National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) Wave 2. The NIDS is the first nationally representative survey on household wealth in South Africa. The cross-sectionally weighted data are found to be fit for use in terms of the univariate distributions of net worth, assets and liabilities, but population totals are probably underestimated due to the presence of missing wealth data in Phase 2 of Wave 2 that is not taken into account in the weights. When compared with national accounts estimates of household net worth, there is an apparent inversion of the estimated totals of financial assets versus non-financial assets. Further research is required into why this is so. We find that the NIDS wealth module is a suitable instrument for the analysis of household wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]