Perspectiva laboral del contrato administrativo de servicios

The Italian approach to the estimation of the total labour input consists of calculating full- time equivalent jobs for legal labour (defined as registered with appropriate authorities), unregistered resident labour, and registered and unregistered non-resident labour. Estimates are made by comparing the various available data sources.

Estimates of labour input are designed to achieve exhaustiveness in the national accounts by ensuring that all productive labour is taken into account. The principle steps in obtaining a comprehensive measure of full-time equivalent employment inputs are:

• harmonisation and integration of the different sources of employment information from the supply and demand of labour, with respect to concepts and definitions, in order to obtain a first estimate of jobs;

• comparison of separate estimates of employment from the demand and supply sources of information to identify a first estimate of labour input and obtain indicators of the various types of employment, such as registered and unregistered multiple-job-holders;

• use of additional sources such as special surveys and administrative records to capture data not collected in the standard data sources of the categories of employment not directly observable from the sources of information;

• conversion of jobs data to a full-time equivalent basis.

Harmonisation of data sources

To ensure consistency in comparisons across aggregates at the geographic, industry and institutional level, international definitions are used for domestic employees, jobs and full-time equivalent units.

The definition of domestic employment is different from that of national employment since domestic employment does not include residents who work in producing units not located in the domestic economic territory, while it does include non-residents working in resident producing units. The concept of national employment includes all resident people employed in both resident and non-resident producing units, and excludes non-resident workers.

The concept of employment used in household surveys is very close to that of national employment. The full harmonization of the definition of employment in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) with the national accounting definition also requires the inclusion of workers permanently in an institution, conscripts and the military forces. Table 1 shows the steps taken in the derivation of total employment for national accounts purposes from the LFS. If consistent definitions and time periods are used across the data sources, comparisons of the results will enable the identification of the same registered employment in each source. The remaining difference will then be indicators of the amount of employment not captured in the standard surveys.

Integration of labour input data

In estimating labour inputs, both the labour supply and labour demand are integrated and then compared.

For labour supply, the main data sources are the Population Census and the quarterly household Labour Force Survey. The major information sources for labour demand statistics are the Industry, Services and Institutions Census, the Agriculture Census, and Ministry of Finance VAT data. Other periodic surveys are used to supplement the basic information or fill in gaps in the data.

Table 1. Derivation of domestic employment for national accounts purposes Number of employed people (Labour Force Survey, annual average)

+ Foreign workers present on the national territory for a period longer than one year, but not included in the _{population register} + Seasonal foreign workers that work in the country for a period less than one year, not included in the population _register + Members of the country’s armed forces in the rest of the world

+ Conscripted forces

+ Staff in charge of national embassies located abroad + Resident workers living permanently in an institution

- Resident frontier workers that work in non-resident establishments

+ Non-resident frontier workers that work in resident establishments + Trainees not paid within enterprises

+ Employed individuals with an age of less than 15 years

+ Workers employed in underground productive activities not covered by the Labour Force Survey +/- Integration with other sources

= Number of domestic workers in national accounting (annual average)

Data from households are usually in terms of persons employed while data from enterprises are usually in terms of jobs. A person can have more than one job. Thus, in order that data from the two sources can be meaningfully compared, they must be converted to the same standard units of labour input, represented by full-time equivalent employment.

The aim of the integration of sources of data from the labour demand (enterprises and institutions) is to produce exhaustive estimates of the registered employment covering primary and secondary jobs.

The aim of the integration of sources of data from labour supply (households) is to obtain an exhaustive estimate of registered and unregistered workers. There are two reasons to suppose that this is likely:

• household surveys pick up labour inputs to enterprises that are not included in enterprise surveys, for example because these enterprises are too small to be registered in the files from which the survey frames are constructed, or because they are too small to be included in the survey;

• individuals may declare their employed condition to household surveys whereas enterprises may conceal those same inputs in order to evade taxes or administrative regulations.

Comparison of labour input data

Comparisons of numbers of jobs are made at a detailed level of economic activity by region, separately for employees, self-employed and unpaid family workers. Three cases are distinguished:

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• registered workers with a main job, when the number of jobs registered by enterprise surveys is equal to the number of workers registered by the household surveys;

• unregistered full-time workers, when the number of workers registered by the household surveys exceeds the number of jobs of the enterprises surveys;

• registered multiple jobs, when the number of jobs exceeds the number of workers.

Additional data sources

To complete the information on labour input, various administrative sources provide direct estimates of employment, when the procedure of integration and comparison described above fails to provide an exhaustive estimate of the input of labour by industry (in particular, in the following industries: agriculture, construction, hotels and restaurants, transport and domestic services).

Other typologies of employment require indirect estimation methods because they are not covered in the standard data sources; unregistered foreign workers and multiple unregistered jobs fall in this category. Table 2 shows the sources used to estimate the numbers and categories of employees.

Full-time equivalents

For the purpose of measuring the input of work as a factor of production, ESA95 suggests estimating the total number of hours worked or, as an alternative measure, the number of the full- time equivalent units. The total of full-time equivalent units is obtained by the sum of (primary and secondary) full-time jobs and part-time jobs, transformed into full-time units. Part-time jobs (primary and secondary) are transformed into full-time equivalents by means of coefficients based on the ratio of hours worked in part-time jobs to hours worked in full-time jobs.