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

(c)
actively seeking work i e had taken specific steps in a specified
recent period
(5) The concept of underemployment is defined to exist when a person's
employment was inadequate either because of an insufficiency in the
volume of employment (visible underemployment), or where because of
a misallocation of labour resources there was under-utihsation of skill,
etc (invisible underemployment) The Resolution recognises that for
operational reasons the statistical measurement of underemployment
was likely to be confined to visible underemployment
(6) In section 12(2) the Resolution gingerly touches on the concept of
discouragement where it is recognised that persons who may want to
work and are available for work may nevertheless not be seeking work
(perhaps because of local labour market difficulties')
Comments on the ILO Recommendations
The casual reader might easily come to the conclusion (although the
subsequent evidence produced in the paper does not really bear this out at
least in the Irish context') that the ILO recommendations must have been
heavily influenced by Politicians with a wish to measure employment and
unemployment in such a way as to minimise derived unemployment rates
After all, persons who are mainly engaged in non-economic activities are
included among the employed on satisfying a very weak work criterion, while,
for example, persons laid off for a few weeks who consider it futile to look for
an alternative job locally may be excluded from the unemployed since the
active job search criterion is not satisfied
Section 10(2) of the Resolution allows a certain flexibility in that the job search
criterion might be relaxed in certain circumstances The opinion has been
expressed at Conferences that this flexibility might be appropriate only in the
case of developing countries However, the long recession has given rise to a
situation where labour absorption is inadequate in many regions of the
industrialised countries, if not on a continuing basis at least on a seasonal
basis Statisticians and labour market analysts would in my view do well to
avoid an ostrich-like approach to the phenomenon of discouragement
Labour force aggregates are analysed not only at national level, but also
increasingly by international agencies (EUROSTAT, OECD, ILO, etc ) for the
purpose of making international comparisons I personally think that it is
unfortunate that in such comparisons the focus is essentially on the
unemployment rate, since this type of analysis provides no information on the
differing national structures of part-time working, underemployment or
discouragement (although over the years the OECD Employment Outlook has
addressed these issues in a number of interesting analyses)
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