Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Economics 28/9/10: Live Register v QNHS measures of unemployment

As promised last night - here are comparatives on Live Register and QNHS measures of unemployment.

First raw data:
Pretty close?
Actually 98.8% close. But recall, QNHS is quarterly, LR is monthly, so what about average quarterly numbers for LR and QNHS?

So 99.2% close.

3 comments:

John said...

So the usual health warnings we attach to Live Register data (in terms of upward bias relative to QHNS ILO unemployment) are overstated?

Is their variance constant w.r.t business cycle?

TrueEconomics said...

John, the warnings notes are for people not to confuse the number on LR with the number of the unemployed. The imputed unemployment rate using LR data is pretty accurate. As far as variances being stable - not enough data, unfortunately, to do a serious stationarity analysis here. This is a common problem with Irish data sources - CSO is only now starting to move into late 20th century of data reporting and database management. And loads of data gaps remain.

But at least they are starting to...

Anonymous said...

thanks for that data, nifty