Статистика України (Dec 2016)
Improving the Monitoring of the Registered Labour Market
Abstract
The registered labour market constitutes a segment of demand and supply with participants taking use of the social protection and/or intermediate services of the employment office, e. g. being subject to interventions at labour market with relevant data recorded in the employment office database. The need to harmonize administrative data of the Ukrainian State Employment Service to methodologies and standards of the European statistics has become especially important in the context of the Euro-integration course, proclaimed by Ukraine. Ukraine features a very wide gap between the registered unemployment indicators and the unemployment measured by the ILO methodology. The trends of domestic and ILO measures of unemployment may be incommensurable and even divergent, especially in crisis periods: while in 2014 the registered unemployment in Ukraine fell by 29 thousand persons, it grew by 271.1 thousand by the ILO methodology. In spite of the severity of the current crisis, only one of the four unemployed persons registers in the Ukrainian State Employment Service and, thus, is entitled for social protection. In EU countries, the more common situation is one with the registered unemployment higher than that measured by the ILO methodology. The legal criteria and practices of granting and suspending the status of registered unemployed, existing in Ukraine, are meant to constrain artificially the increasing numbers of registered unemployed, to avoid extra spending. Because the dynamic series on registered unemployment in Ukraine cannot be considered as an adequate measurement of the labour market tendencies and/or structural characteristics of the unemployed, it cannot be used for quality assessment of unemployment indicators or their modeling by the ILO methodology, at the level of small territories and target groups in particular. Due to the focus on job placement indicators in assessing the Ukrainian State Employment Service performance, its effort is concentrated on filing of vacancies announced by employers, whereas the assistance in searching more suitable jobs for unemployed persons becomes a matter of secondary importance. Data on numbers and structural characteristics of vacancies are often taken for assessment and forecasting of the demand for workforce. However, these data measure only the small segment of the total demand for labour force, often with lower quality or skills. Another problem related with administrative data of the Ukrainian State Employment Service is lack of a clear classification of interventions, required, inter alia, to draw the line between active and passive programs of labour market. The analysis enables for outlining three principal areas for improvement of the monitoring of the registered labour market: extending the coverage of phenomena/processes at labour market; revaluation of the indicators’ weight in view of their conformity to the political objectives; introduction of the Eurostat classification for labour market policy.
