Use this report’s Dataviz to compare and visualise key labour market trends across countries and regions.
This report examines the state of global labour markets, highlighting stable headline employment alongside stalled progress in job quality and widening inequalities. The report analyses productivity, demographic and economic pressures shaping work in the year ahead and outlines the challenges to achieving more inclusive growth.
How do you calculate these estimates?
The estimates are produced using a series of models, which establish statistical relationships between observed labour market indicators and explanatory variables. In general, a sophisticated algorithm identifies the relationships that minimizes the expected error of the estimation. These relationships are used to impute missing observations and to make projections for the indicators.
What kind of figures are used in your estimates?
Not all countries submit statistically comparable data. Before deciding whether to add a country’s dataset, the ILO assesses the source (i.e. national labour force survey or population census), whether it’s nationally representative or localized to urban areas, and if it includes data for comparable age groups. The recent efforts by the ILO to produce harmonized indicators from country-reported microdata have greatly increased the comparability of the observations.
Our models also include country-level data on population, employment, growth, and poverty and economic indicators from the following sources:
Do you ever revise your model?
We are constantly improving the ILO modelled estimates. This usually happens for one of three reasons:
Your estimates about a specific country don’t match what I see on this country’s official website for statistics. Why is that?
Countries are asked to follow the conventions, recommendations and guidelines of the International Conference of Labour Statisticians when reporting their data. However, some countries choose to apply different definitions of the indicators when reporting data nationally. Most of the input data used in the ILO modelled estimates series are derived from ILO microdata tabulations. That is, the ILO collects the underlying survey datasets from countries and processes these to obtain internationally comparable labour statistics. The figures obtained through ILO microdata processing may differ from national statistics.
How much of the data in the ILO modelled estimates series is imputed rather than derived from official national statistics?
For the global aggregates, the reported national unemployment data since 2017 cover 67.5 per cent of the world’s labour force. The world aggregates include reported data for countries comprising nearly three-quarters of the world’s labour force since 2015, and for more than 97 per cent of the global labour force since 2010.
In terms of regional coverage, the figures included for the Americas and Europe and Central Asia regions are almost exclusively reported (real) data. Africa has the lowest reporting rate, with around 15 per cent of the region’s labour force covered since 2017. However, longer-term coverage is significantly better, with nearly 88 per cent of the region’s labour force covered by at least 1 reported unemployment rate since 2010. The Arab States region has the second lowest reported data coverage, with around 48 per cent of the region’s labour force covered by one or more unemployment estimates since 2017 and more than 96 per cent covered since 2010. This is followed by Asia and the Pacific, with more than 67 per cent coverage since 2017 and nearly 74 per cent since 2015.
Whether a given data point in the ILO modelled estimates series is reported or imputed (generated by the model), is indicated in the corresponding data tables published on ILOSTAT. Additionally, a data point is labelled adjusted if it has been derived as a combination of reported data and other data sources. For instance, in a country for which the labour force participation rate is reported the labour force level will be adjusted since it is produced by combining the reported rate with the population benchmark from the United Nations World Population Prospects database.
Where can I read more about your methodology?
You can find more information in the publication below or go to the ILO modelled estimates page on ILOSTAT.
The ILO modelled estimates series provides a complete set of internationally comparable labour statistics, including both nationally reported observations and imputed data for countries with missing data. The imputations are produced through a series of econometric models maintained by the ILO. This document describes the methodology of the series.
How can I cite this database?
Please cite the data on the WESO Data Companion as: International Labour Organization, ILO modelled estimates.
Why does the ILO use estimates?
The data used to prepare the World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends are gathered by countries which regularly submit employment statistics to the ILO. Conducting surveys is a complicated and costly task which some countries are unable to do on a systematic basis. To compensate, the ILO has developed statistical models in order to fill the gaps for countries in years for which no data have been reported. These models have been tested for statistical accuracy and allow the ILO to forecast changes in key labour market indicators as well as to produce global and regional aggregates. The end result of these models is a complete set of national labour statistics alongside with global and regional aggregates, which are published in the ILO modelled estimates data series and are used in the WESO Data Finder.
I found a bug and/or want to send you feedback on the Data Companion. Whom should I write to?
You can get in touch with our team by writing to [email protected]. We appreciate your feedback!
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