Are the new national accounts guidelines any good? 6. Labour.

This blog is part of a series that discusses the new guidelines for the national accounts. Look also here (introduction), here (national accounts are political accounts), here (valuing resource depletion), here (households) and here (the (not so) informal economy).

Labour statistics are one of the key macroeconomic data sets. They are also part of the national accounts. Jobs, hours worked, employment, some volunteer labour, self-employment, and, partly, labour used for own production (like building your own house) are all covered. One can bicker over which kinds of volunteer work should be included and which not. A doctor working for naught in an organized way in a disaster area is included. An economist doing the same – probably not. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. As such, the chapter on labour is clear and consistent. Also, the reasons given to estimate hours and jobs and where to draw the lines are valid.

But I do have two problems.

• The first is of a macroeconomic nature.
• The second is of a socioeconomic nature.

The first: The national accounts are based on the concept of production. Which means that only labour producing something, including goods (not services) for one’s own use, is counted. That means that the unemployed are left out. This is all right on the micro and meso level and enables sectoral and international comparisons of, for instance, productivity or the importance of sectors. But on the macro level it is wrong. The national accounts should enable the identification of glaring inefficiencies. Unemployment is one of these. Which means that (broad) unemployment has to be included. Including unemployment in the estimation of macro-productivity, or Net Domestic Product per worker (including the unemployed) will show that (a) productivity per person in the USA is higher than in the EU but also that productivity in the EU increased a little faster than estimated at present, as (broad) unemployment has declined, contrary to the USA.

The second. Work is not just about income. Jobs also have to be safe and enable a sense of dignity. At this moment, the discussion about the ´precariat´, people working bad jobs. Precarious work has, according to Kalleberg, three defining dimensions:

• Drivers of precarious work: things that have led to increases in precarious work, such as union decline or removal of statutory and regulatory protections.

• Precarious work itself: work that is insecure, uncertain, and unstable; and that provides few opportunities for advancement.

• Outcomes or correlates of precarious work and/or its drivers, such as: economic insecurity; poverty; inequality; limited economic and social benefits; and exposure to dangerous and hazardous working conditions.

We need to measure this. The discussion shows that there are quite some problems in this regard – not just in developing and poor countries and not just for informal work. Look here for the US; look here for Germany. However, even when precarious work is well-defined (see the Kalleberg report), estimates of the share of precarious work in total employment are scarce. An ILO study on forced labour is actually titled ´ Hard to see, harder to count: Handbook on forced labour surveys´. And even Damian Grisham, who published important work on precarious work, often had to take recourse to data on informal work.

Taking into account that on 23 October 2025 the ILO (International Labour Organization) published new guidelines to conceptualize and define the informal economy, we still might have to use a ´second best´ approach and to combine data on informal work for employees and independent contractors in combination with data on unionization to arrive at a decent estimate of decent work.

This leads, as an addition to the data mentioned in the guidelines, to the next schedule|

• Total population
• Households
  • Labour force including broad unemployment (persons)
    • Employees
    • Self-employed and contractors
    • (Broad) unemployed
  • Employed and unemployed people per household (and demographic group?)
• Hours worked and available, including hours worked by employed people involuntarily working part-time jobs
• Share of informal jobs in total employment (self-employed and employees)
• Unionization

This can be added to the national accounts at a low cost. It will enable us to point out glaring inefficiencies. Additionally, it highlights possible injustices.