Developing annual population and gross domestic product estimates for local municipality development models in South Africa: applications of Zipf's rule from 2001 to 2013

Abstract

Policymakers in South African local municipalities have to plan and annually monitor progress on local population and economic growth for alignment with national objectives. Currently, South Africa's statistical system provides no data to enable local municipality policymakers to plan and annually monitor local population and economic growth. Policymakers are limited to census data that are updated once in 5–10 years, with no recourse to useful data during interim non-census years. This article provides a simple and transparent method of developing estimates for local population and economic growth in non-census years. The estimates, based on Zipf's rule, are found to be statistically consistent with census year local municipality data and useful for a better understanding of South African local municipalities during non-census years.