Page 116 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS463 Noraliza M.A. et al.
Within the view of the policy makers and regulators, this lengthy time
series is very convenient for monitoring purposes, looking at historical points
to identify trends, cycles and structures and ultimately formulate the suitable
strategies and initiatives. This features also appeal to the academia in
conduction labour market and human capital development studies.
Beyond the compulsory questions to identify labour force status of the
population, Malaysia’s LFS which canvassed all members in the selected
households is one of the few national surveys that asks detailed demographic
characteristics of the population. Examples of the questions are marital status,
educational attainment, highest certificate obtained and field of studies. This
is a cost-effective method to ensure regular updates as a substitute to the
population and housing census. This features also make it the most commonly
used survey to ride additional modules and supplementary questionnaire
regularly or on ad hoc basis. This corroborates with the findings of ILO (2017a)
and European Communities (2003) that LFS offers a consistent framework to
study employment, unemployment and persons outside the labour force
concurrently, with rich and extensive dimensions for disaggregation, as well as
provides venue to study parts of informality through the informal sector
employment. In line with the European Communities (2003) observation, the
Malaysia’s LFS also to some extend facilitates the opportunity to obtain labour
supply information across all sectors of the economy in a consistent manner.
LFS in Malaysia can be considered as one of the more matured and
established data collection activity in the national statistical system. Sound
methodology is in place since it adheres to ILO’s international standards in
terms of compilation and dissemination. This allows for international validity,
consistency, accuracy, reliability, timeliness and comparability. To date, the
statistics derived from Malaysia’s LFS is consistently used to update the
ILOSTATS statistical database .
2
As LFS presents numerous advantages, it is common to witnessed its usage
across various research and studies. The use of LFS to mobilize efforts on
human capital development is most apparent in the medium term strategies
documents, i.e. five-year Malaysia Plans, the most recent being Mid-Term
Review of the Eleventh Malaysia Plan. Additionally, short term policies
documents that utilised the LFS especially within the scope of human capital
development are Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) Annual Report and Ministry of
Finance (MOF) Economic Outlook. The statistics of the LFS is also the main
features in the studies on labour market position employed by independent
and government-backed research agencies such as Khazanah Research
Institute. At the international forefront, labour market studies by the World

2 The ILOSTATS is a website maintained by the ILO Department of Statistics which offers access
to data tables for key indicators, statistical briefs, concepts and methods.
105 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9