Stats SA wants to know your income

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Pretoria - Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) says it has visited more than 2 500 households for its Income and Expenditure Survey (IES) currently underway.

Before the launch of the project in August, roughly 33 000 houses were selected to take part in the survey over the 12 month period ending in September 2011.

Officials said while the three-week long public servants strike made the launch of the survey more challenging, it was now all systems go with publicity and data collection in full swing.

"Fieldworkers now have the job of visiting all these households to help them complete the survey. The survey consists of a questionnaire as well as two weekly diaries, which will detail the household's spending habits," said IES manager, Werner Ruch.

People were asked to record all spending over two weeks with as much detail as possible to ensure that the best possible information is available for updating the CPI basket.

Ultimately, the success of the survey will be measured by the response rate as well as the quality of the data collected. According to Ruch "a 100 percent response rate" will be ideal, but an improvement on the 93 percent response rate for the 2005/06 survey would be great.

The purpose of IES is mainly to gather information on spending patterns of South African households to update the Consumer Price Index (CPI) basket of goods and services.

Released monthly by Stats SA, the CPI is an important economic indicator, which is used by the Reserve Bank to determine the interest rate.

"It is (therefore) very important that the CPI is compiled based on accurate data as this has a direct impact on households through the increase or decrease in interest rates," Ruch said.