Employers and Self Employed Series 2001-2013

The Surveys of Employers and Self-Employed (SESE) are a set of surveys undertaken by Statistics South Africa in September 2001, September 2005, September 2009 and September 2013. These are surveys of non-VAT registered businesses in South Africa. The primary aim of these surveys is to obtain estimates of the size of value added in the informal sector for the compilation of the national accounts. Because no business register exists for businesses that are not registered for VAT, these businesses must be identified in another way. Stats SA identified non-VAT registered businesses through the Labour Force Surveys (in 2001 and 2005) and the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (in 2009 and 2013). Individuals who were surveyed in the (Q)LFSs and found to be running unregistered businesses were then targeted for enumeration in the SESE. The SESEs asked many detailed questions about the business run by the owner and enabled Stats SA to obtain value added in each unregistered business and thus an estimate for the whole unregistered economy.
A stacked cross-sectional dataset - the Employers and Self-employed Series (ESS) - has been created by DataFirst from these four surveys and released publicly via the DataFirst web portal.