WHAT IS THE BEST MEASURE OF EMPLOYMENT AND ... - TARA

DISCUSSION
Terry Corcoran Donal Garvey's paper is a timely one Already the Labour
Force Survey is an important source of data on the main labour force
aggregates - and its importance will grow as the annual series, begun in 1983,
becomes more established Yet only a small number of analysts have looked
at the nitty—gntty of the LFS and got a feel for its methodology and for the
range of data it generates - the latter being inevitably far greater than what is
published This paper - quite apart from addressing the question raised in the
title - gives a useful brief guided tour to the potential of the LFS which will
encourage greater recourse to it as a basis for research
In approaching his central theme the author accepts as his starting point the
ILO recommendation of 1982, but enters a caution as to the need to take
additional account - over and above that suggested by the recommendation -
of
(a)
(b)
(c)
part-time work
under-employment
discouragement
In each case the likely "correction" to the ILO unemployment rate as a
measure of the failure of the labour market would be upwards - in the case of
(a) by a downward adjustment of the denominator and in cases (b) and (c) by
some notional upward adjustment of the numerator It may of course also be
necessary to adjust for the ILO treatment of someone seeking part-time work
as being the equivalent, in terms of unemployment, of someone seeking
full-time work These issues are re-addressed in a more concrete context at
the end of the paper
The effect of actually applying the ILO framework to the Irish case is the main
subject-matter of the paper This is done systematically by reference to a
number of questions in the LFS The process - identifying as it does some 27
different groups within the adult population by reference solely to their
relationship to the labour market - illustrates rather well the author's point in
the introduction on the complexity of the concepts underlying the apparently
simple notions of employment and unemployment
The main effects can be seen in Table D and a number of the appendices
Most notably, as compared to the PES approach, the ILO approach leads to
(for 1986)
(i)
transfer of approximately 30,000 males from unemployment to inactivity
(a surprisingly large number of whom were aged under 45)
(II)
transfer of approximately 35,000 married women from "inactivity" to
participation in the labour force - about 7,000 to employment and
28,000 to unemployment, the large majority seeking part-time work
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