The Manpower Survey is a survey of enterprises in South Africa that provides industry and occupation data by gender and race. It covered both the private and public sector, but excluded workers in the informal sector and agricultural sector, and domestic workers in private households. Enterprise details for the survey sample were obtained from government sources, and the survey instrument was a form mailed to enterprise managers.
The dataset available from DataFirst includes data from the surveys conducted in 1965-1994, unearthed in a project to find and share historical South African microdata. The data was obtained with the assistance of Lucia Lotter, Anneke Jordaan and Marie-Lousie van Wyk from the Human Sciences Research Council's Research Use and Impact Assessment Department. The project was made possible by an exploratory grant obtained by Andrew Kerr and Martin Wittenberg of DataFirst from the Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) research initiative. PEDL is a joint research initiative of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Uk Department For International Development (DFID). It aims to develop a research programme focusing on private-sector development in low-income countries.