Page 100 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS463 Siti Asiah A. et al.
Labour Account was brought up as early as 1980s, as a result of discussions
at international level concerning the linkages of labour statistics with other
areas of statistics namely social and demographic statistics and economic
statistics as organized by the System of National Accounts (SNA) (Hoffmann,
2000). This was developed into logical framework for obtaining the key labour
th
market variables during 15 International Conference of Labour Statisticians
(ICLS) in 1993 (Buhmann et. al, 2002). In addition, labour account provides a
time series of estimates of the number of employed persons, number of jobs,
hours worked and income earned for each industry in one coherent
framework.
Several countries are at different stages of developing labour account such
as Australia, Denmark, the Netherland and Switzerland. Australia has benefited
from the development of labour account for instance, it has resulted in
consistent estimates of key labour market variables over time. For the first
time, statistics on total number of employed persons for Australia is available
from the industry perspective in a time series. This could be used to better
assess policy changes targeting a particular industry, providing a more
complete picture of the number of people impacted by the change (Australian
Labour Account Fact Sheet 6, 2018).
In order to ensure that a country is able to manage labour supply
efficiently, countries should carefully measure the labour market situation
through reliable data. Thus, considering all benefits mentioned above,
Malaysia is planning to develop labour account based on data collection by
DOSM and others agencies as well as from administrative records. Labour
account offers a framework to bring together Malaysia’s labour market data
from multiple statistical sources into coherent and consistent set of labour
statistics which consist of four components namely filled job, employment,
labour cost and hours of works.

2. Methodology
The ILO lists six key elements in labour statistics which are i) employed
persons and jobs; ii) unemployed and underemployed persons; iii) job
vacancies; iv) hours of work and full-time equivalents; v) income from
employment and labour costs; and vi) organisation of the labour market i.e.
statistics on collective labour agreements, industrial disputes and trade-union
memberships (Australian Labour Account, 2018).
At present there is no international standard for developing labour
account. However, the ILO has documented a guideline comprising four basic
steps in the development of labour account involved statistical integration.
First, is definition of the model and the identity equation. Second, is
harmonization of definitions and classifications in source statistics,

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