Prissy about data

Let's start the New Year on a boring technical note. It will however deal with a crucial element of our economic performance - jobs. Do we have a real grip on how, why, where and, more importantly, how many jobs are being created in the economy?

The Gonzi administration frequently boasts about job gains and spouts figures to prove its point. Even so, no matter how they get massaged, the figures which show how the economy as a whole is performing, like gross domestic product data, hardly bear out the official optimism. Another worrying point is that the official data on jobs seem to have become increasingly shaky.

In his budget speech for 2006, delivered on October 31, 2005, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi spoke as follows: "It is clear that the results being obtained in the labour market provide another positive indicator regarding the state of the economy. Up to end September of this year, the number of persons in full-time gainful employment had reached 137,813, an increase of 0.2 per cent on the previous year...

"It is relevant to mention that our economy also managed to generate a substantial number of part-time jobs. In fact, the number of persons with part-time employment as their principal source of work reached 23,138, an increase of 2,190, or 10.5 per cent.

"The number of persons registering for work under the two parts of the unemployment register stood at 7,210. Therefore, the rate of those seeking work stood at five per cent. This amounts to a decrease of 930 persons, or of 11.4 per cent, on the previous year. This is also one of the lowest rates of unemployment of the last 10 years."

I pored over this data and remained perplexed. How many people were in employment, full-time and part-time? And how many people were unemployed? As one looks at the tables presented with the PM's budget statement, one starts to realise that something is wrong. Where do the people having part-time employment as their principal source of work feature? They cannot be part of the unemployed since these were counted at 7,210. Were they being counted then as part of the full-time gainfully employed?

The question is not a slight one, since when unemployment is being assessed, what presumably is taken into consideration is the number of unemployed as compared to the total workforce or labour supply. The latter must consist of the sum of workers who have a job, full-time or part-time (without double counting those who simultaneously have a full-time and a part-time job, or those who hold a number of part-time occupations), plus those workers who are looking for a job, but cannot find it, i.e. the unemployed.

In Parliament, I duly asked the Prime Minister to please explain the situation. Here is what he replied: "...The information issued by the Employment and Training Corporation, as published by the National Statistics Office, includes separate tables for persons who are gainfully employed full-time and for persons who work part-time. For the purposes of all news releases, which include data published by the ETC, labour supply means persons working full-time, added to persons who are listed under Part I and Part 2 of the unemployment register. For this reason, persons working part-time are not included as part of the labour supply in data issued from the ETC".

In a separate reply to a further question I put to him, the minister responsible for labour policy, said this: "I am informed that the figures for part-time workers do not form part of the labour supply, as is clearly indicated in the table from the Economic Survey... These figures are shown in a separate category. With regard to part-time workers, I am also informed that since these are already working, they therefore cannot be considered as part of the unemployed".

As revealed by these two ministerial pronouncements, the situation is quite astounding. Part-time workers are treated as non-persons; they do not feature in the workforce at all or in the ETC calculations regarding unemployment. Yet, their numbers have grown so fast in recent years that they must surely have an impact on our economic output. If, arguably, their existence could be glossed over in the past, that is no longer true now.

Thus, year after year, we have been fed ETC data about employment - still are - that is premised on the claim that part-time workers simply do not exist as part of the workforce. The government seems to be happy with this. To the contrary, it should be concerned that the tools available to assess the developing situation are just not functioning well.

When one raises this issue, one is not being prissy about the data, as some might try to argue. Many times in the recent past, commentators including myself, have expressed scepticism about the quality of economic and social information that the government is supplying and using. Or even about its trustworthiness.

If the Gonzi administration remains happy with sloppy data because it allows better margins for propaganda, the rest of us should become more rigorous in assessing the information that the government displays, and not only by way of checking on the small print.