In view of the growing demand for more frequent data about the labour market, the Ministry of Statisitcs and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) would be coming out with monthly periodic labour force surveys (PLFS) for both rural and urban areas from January next year. The Ministry will also release a back series, at least for the previous 12 months, with adjustments made in line with the higher standard error of the new monthly series of the PLFS to make the data comparable, a senior government official said. Since the sample size would be lower than the current labour surveys, the standard error for the monthly surveys would be a bit higher, the official said. “We will be coming out with monthly PLFS for rural and urban areas by January. The standard errors of the monthly estimate would be higher because the number of sample points would be less. Even now we calculate the quarterly by summating each month’s data for rural and similarly for urban also. Now we have changed the methodology to make it representative even on a monthly basis, otherwise it was representative on a three-month basis,” the official told The Indian Express. Standard error is used to measure sampling error as it measures how accurately the mean of a sample distribution represents the mean of the population. In simpler words, it indicates the level of variation between different samples of a population and the population itself. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) under MoSPI had launched PLFS in April 2017. Quarterly bulletins provide details of labour force indicators such as Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR), Worker Population Ratio (WPR), Unemployment Rate (UR). At present, the MoSPI releases rural PLFS data on an annual basis and urban PLFS data on a quarterly basis along with an annual report which combines data for both urban and rural on an annual basis. Other employment surveys such as the survey by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) comes out on a weekly and monthly basis. The number of urban households surveyed in the PLFS feature around 45,000 households. With a revision in sampling methodology for the PLFS data on a monthly frequency, the sample is going to be lower than this. Officials, however, maintained that even though the standard error would be higher, it would be less than the levels in other employment surveys available in the market. “Our monthly errors would still be lower than what is in the market. But no one can doubt the robustness of our data. The idea was to make labour data more easily available. The gold standard would still be quarterly and annual (PLFS) data. But because the demand was so high for monthly data, we are meeting it with the caveat that this has a higher standard error,” the official said.
