Synthetic populations of South African urban areas

This article presents the procedure followed to generate complete synthetic populations from the South African National Census. The populations are accurate at both household and individual level, and were generated for nine major metropolitan and provincial areas. The disaggregate description of the population is useful in a variety of modelling contexts, especially if one wants to observe or study the distributional effects of, for example, policy measures. That is, studies in which equity and equality are of concern. The datasets are publicly available from https://doi.org/10.17632/dh4gcm7ckb.1.