Urban Household Panel Survey 2004, Round 1

The Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) at Oxford University in collaboration with the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has been conducting a labour market panel survey of urban sectors in Tanzania since 2004. There are now three waves of this survey covering the period 2004 to 2006. There are two unique features of the Urban Panel Survey (UPS) that are important. First, the UPS provides comparable information, including income data, on both wage employees and the self-employed. All labor force participants in the selected households were to be interviewed. Thus the sample of workers spans the formal and informal sectors, public and private employees, the self-employed, unemployed and so on. The second unique feature of the UPS data set is its panel dimension. During the course of July-August 2005 the initial UPS sample was resurveyed and questions were asked in order to link their activities and earnings in 2005 with the same variables in 2003/04, creating a panel of individual workers. During the period August-October 2006 a further survey was conducted. Thus the UPS constitutes one of very few household panel data sets in sub-Saharan Africa.