Employment Satellite Account: from “Employed” to “Full-Time Equivalent”

Employment data is a critical input for conducting an Employment Impact Assessment (EmpIA) by any international financial institution, donor agency or social partner wishing to evaluate the employment impact of their interventions. However, as EmpIA requires high-quality employment data by detailed industry classification over a certain number of years, the existing published official data are often not fit for purpose.

Using ILOSTAT, which gathers Labour Force Surveys and Household Surveys from national statistical offices, this paper describes the efforts to clean reported employment data and to impute missing values at the detailed International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) of All Economic Activities 2-digit level (as reported in either ISIC Revision 3.1 or ISIC Revision 4). The results of this paper are measures of employment in terms of both headcounts and full-time equivalents, which are also broken down by sex, age, skills, and employment formality. Data are available for 187 countries for the years 2004-2021. The employment data are subsequently mapped on to GTAP regional aggregations where appropriate, and are available for 158 (out of 160) countries and regions.

The imputed observations are subject to sizeable uncertainty and should therefore not be used for cross-country comparisons or rankings.