Today’s post summarises the timeliness of official statistics in South Africa. It is also worth noting that there has been an increase in the number of statistical releases by Statistics South Africa over the last 2 decades, while filled posts at Stats SA have been declining since 2017/18. As we showed in an earlier post, South Africa compares favourably to wealthy countries and other emerging markets in terms of the volume of indicators available, but South Africa’s indicators are available on a less timely basis than for many major economies (at least based on the World Bank’s database). Codera has done a deep dive into South Africa’s data gaps, and we provided a set of recommendations for modernising South Africa’s data ecosystem (here, here, here, and here).
