Are You Being Asked? Impacts of Respondent Selection on Measuring Employment
Accurate estimates of men's and women's employment are at the heart of understanding sources of productivity and economic growth and designing well-targeted, gender-sensitive labor policies. How respondent selection in household and labo...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/899841582040036337/Are-You-Being-Asked-Impacts-of-Respondent-Selection-on-Measuring-Employment http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33357 |
| Summary: | Accurate estimates of men's and
women's employment are at the heart of understanding
sources of productivity and economic growth and designing
well-targeted, gender-sensitive labor policies. How
respondent selection in household and labor force surveys
affects these estimates is a key question, for which
experimental evidence outside high-income settings is
limited. Leveraging two concurrent, national surveys in
Malawi that differed in their approach to respondent
selection, the analysis shows that, compared with the best
practice of privately interviewing adults about their
employment outcomes, the common
"business-as-usual" approach that permits the use
of proxy respondents and non-private/group interviews leads
to significant underreporting of employment across a range
of wage and self-employment activities, with stronger
effects for women and for a longer (12-month) recall period.
Under the business-as-usual approach, the main factors
linked to underreporting include household wealth, proxy
reporting, and potential difficulties associated with
interpreting/answering questions on household non-farm enterprises. |
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