The latest international recommendations on how to measure some of the key headline labour market indicators, including the labour force participation rate, employment-to-population ratio and unemployment rate, are contained in the Resolution I concerning statistics of work, employment and labour underutilization adopted in 2013 by the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS). These standards introduced a number of important advances that will impact the way work and labour force statistics are collected and disseminated by countries around the world in the years to come. T
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The latest international recommendations on how to measure some of the key headline labour market indicators, including the labour force participation rate, employment-to-population ratio and unemployment rate, are contained in the Resolution I concerning statistics of work, employment and labour underutilization adopted in 2013 by the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS). These standards introduced a number of important advances that will impact the way work and labour force statistics are collected and disseminated by countries around the world in the years to come. To support their wide implementation, the 19th ICLS called on the ILO to 'conduct further conceptual and methodological work including testing' and develop 'technical manuals and model data collection instruments' aligned with the latest standards (ILO, 2013a). As follow-up, in 2015, the ILO launched a global project of labour force survey (LFS) pilot studies. The Project had as main aim to develop and test alternative survey questionnaires to collect statistics on high priority topics such as employment, labour underutilization (comprising time-related underemployment, unemployment and the potential labour force), and own-use production work, in line with the 19th ICLS standards. The ultimate objective is to develop evidence-based guidance on LFS questionnaire design to support countries in adopting the new standards.
This report, presents the main findings on the measurement of employment drawn from the ILO LFS pilot study project. The report is structured as follows. Section I provides a short overview of the latest international recommendations on the measurement of employment included in the Resolution I adopted by the 19th ICLS. Section II describes the testing strategy and the alternative questionnaire approaches to identify persons employed developed for testing. Section III details the first stage of testing (cognitive interviewing), including the issues evaluated, the main findings and changes introduced to the alternative survey questionnaires as a result. Section IV describes the second stage of testing (experimental field tests), including the issues assessed and findings. The final section (V) provides a summary of the main conclusions and recommendations drawn from the pilot studies.
Edited excerpts from publication.
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