Statistics in Focus: Population and social conditions. Dynamic Measures of Economic Activity and Unemployment: 2 . Status in terms of the amount of time spent. 1999.18

Abstract

This report follows another study on some dynamic measures of change in economic activity, and in particular unemployment, constructed from the European Community Household Panel (see Statistics in focus No. 17/1999). It is based on a research carried out on behalf of Eurostat by Vijay Verma, Professor at the University of Essex. In the present study, the focus is on measures describing the longer-term activity patterns, constructed by aggregating information on a panel of individuals over time. Measures of economic activity defined in terms of the proportion of time individuals spend in different states of activity are presented. At the micro­level, these proportions measure the degrees to which an individual is economically active, employed or unemployed over a period such as one or more years. At the societal level, these measures provide the corresponding rates averaged over the period. Furthermore, they indicate the extent to which the experience of, say, unemployment is shared in the society, or is concentrated on the same group(s) in the form of long­term unemployment. The results presented here are based on the only longitudinal data of this type available at the EU level, and are in this sense unique. Furthermore, the present analysis is also of considerable methodological interest: several new measures describing various aspects of individuals' economic activity have been developed. It should be noted, however, that the data used were collected in 1994/95, and therefore do not reflect the more recent changes in the labour market in the Member States.