Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs)

Description

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a database (table) that reflects the structure of a given economy and is an important building block in the compilation of a SAM fixed-price model. The general, or partial equilibrium structure derived from a SAM, depicts the inter-relationship between the economic sectors and the various role-players (private sector, households, government, and where relevant, the rest of the world) in a particular economy. Based on these relationships, the SAMs serve as excellent tools for project impact analysis. Because a SAM is compiled for a specific year, it gives a description of the economy for that particular year.

PLEASE CLICK ON PROVINCES ABOVE TO ACCESS THE RESPECTIVE SAMS. AT PRESENT ONLY THE WESTERN CAPE, EASTERN CAPE, NORTH WEST, LIMPOPO, KWAZULU-NATAL, AND MPUMALANGA SAMS ARE AVAILABLE.

(Some of the files are approximately 10MB in size, and downloading may take a few minutes, depending on the speed of your connection)

This fact results in criticism that the SAM is static. However, although the magnitude of the variables in an economy changes on a daily basis, the relationship between the variables remains fairly constant for a number of years, as the overall structure of the economy changes slowly over time. To ensure that the structural changes that do occur are captured, SAMs should ideally be updated every four to six years.

Background

The nine provincial authorities of South Africa have been assigned specific responsibilities by the Constitutional Act. Especially the provision of socio-economic services to previously disadvantaged communities and the promotion of overall socio-economic development feature prominently. To do this, provincial and other developmental authorities need to set distinct goals and priorities. This in turn requires proper planning, monitoring and evaluation of the related development initiatives. However, limited relevant and useful economic information at provincial level were available, to support such analysis. Therefore, in 2004, the need for SAMs at provincial level was expressed by the provincial authorities, to support the provision of information for analysis purposes.

The DBSA, the DPLG, now the Department of Cooperative Governance (DCOG), as well as representatives from the nine provincial authorities, formed a partnership in 2004 and managed the process of compiling a national as well as nine provincial Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs). These representatives provided the necessary funding to compile the SAMs. A National Steering Committee (SC) was constituted, comprising Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), National Treasury, DPLG and the DBSA, which were responsible to oversee and provide technical guidance in the process of compiling the SAMs. Conningarth Economists was appointed to compile the SAMs under the guidance of the national SC and DBSA was allocated the responsibility of coordinating the project.

To obtain all the data that was needed to compile provincial SAMs, various data sources were used. It is recognised that some sources may not always be as reliable as published national figures, but were used as they were the only available source of the required information at the time. Examples of these sources include:

· Population census of 2001 (Stats SA)

· Household Expenditure Surveys (Stats SA and Bureau of Market Research)

· Labour Force Surveys (Stats SA)

· Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

· Industrial censuses and other sectoral censuses

· Information gathered by provincial governments during the execution of their executive functions

· Individual research projects conducted in a province

Once completed, the nine provincial SAMs were benchmarked with the national SAM. The compilation of these provincial SAMs can be regarded as a greenfields project and it is expected that that future updates of the provincial SAMs will improve in quality as it is expected that the underlying data will improve over time.

Application

With the approval of the respective provincial offices, the SAMs are hereby presented (see map above), to ensure access to the Provincial SAMs. Some of the SAMs are presently not published due to the outstanding approval by the respective Provincial Authorities.

Please note that the SAMs hereby published, should be applied at own discretion and DBSA cannot be held responsible for the wrongful, or inaccurate application or usage of data or information originating from the published SAMs – please refer to the full disclaimer. Furthermore, it is important to note that the SAMs have the year 2006 as their base year, and cognizance should also be taken by the users of the SAM of economic and other industry changes which may have had an impact over time.

For further information contact: Conningarth Economists at (012) 349 1915 (technical support), Ando Donkers (DCOG) (012) 324 0888 (general advice) or Dries van Niekerk (011) 313 3271 (coordinator at DBSA) or Booye Rousseau (011) 313 3665 (coordinator at DBSA).