Unemployment

There are two standard measures for unemployment used in official statistics in the UK. The measures are different and are each subject to advantages and disadvantages.

The claimant count

The claimant count is a count of all persons claiming unemployment-related benefits, taken from Jobcentre Plus administrative systems. As such it is not subject to sampling variability and can therefore be disaggregated to very high levels of detail. However, it excludes those who are unemployed who are not eligible to claim (for example those out of work but whose partner works), and those who do not wish to claim.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) unemployment measure

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) unemployment measure is a count of those who are out of work and want a job, have actively sought work in the last 4 weeks and are available to start work in the next two weeks; plus those who are out of work, have found a job and are waiting to start in the next 2 weeks, is a more encompassing measure of unemployment, which is used around the world. However, as the data come from the Labour Force Survey, the results are sample-based estimates and therefore subject to differing degrees of sampling variability, i.e. the true value for any measure lies in a differing range about the estimated value. This range or sampling variability increases as the detail in the data increases, for example local authority data are subject to higher variability than regional data.

Annual unemployment rates (based on the ILO definition) are calculated in all EU countries leading to the calculation of EU harmonised unemployment rates. These rates are calculated on an annual basis and are expressed as a percentage of the economically active population.

Headlines, releases and bulletins

Key economic statistics, May 2013

StatsWales

Detailed datasets are available on the StatsWales website.

StatsWales website: Unemployment (external link)

StatsWales website: European Union harmonised unemployment rates (external link)

Other sources of information

Links to information published by other organisations.

Office for National Statistics website: Labour Market Statistics  (external link)

Nomis website (external link)

Please send any queries or comments by Email to economic.stats@wales.gsi.gov.uk