Sources of Australian Labour Market Statistics

(last updated November 5th, 2006)

ABS Labour Force Survey-based statistics

The key source of information on the Australian Labour Market is the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey (LFS). The ABS use this survey to produce the monthly:

• Labour Force, Australia (ABS catalogue number 6202.0);
• the linked Labour Force, Australia - Spreadsheets (6202.0.55.001); and
• the spreadsheets and supertables datacubes of Labour Force, Australia, detailed - electronic delivery (6291.0.55.001)

As you could guess, the ABS internet site is a good place to go for this - all of their publications and standard data products are available free of charge. Once you're their, select 'Statistics', and then 'By Catalogue Number', and then scroll down the list until you get to the '62' section and click on it. This will bring up a list of the publications mentioned above, which tell you a great deal about the Australian labour market.

It also brings up a number of other publications. Most of these are Labour Force Supplementary Surveys. These are Surveys run with the Labour Force Survey on a much less frequent basis, covering specific topics. These surveys include:

• Persons not in the labour force (6220.0, annual) - this is a good source on the activities and characteristics of people who are not in the labour force, including whether they would like to join the labour force or not.
• Underemployment (6265.0, annual) - this publication provides considerable detail on part-time workers who would prefer more hours.
• Job Search Experience (6222.0, annual) - covers the experiences of job seekers, both the unemployed who have not yet found a job and persons who started a job in the 12 months prior to the survey (whether they were unemployed prior to starting the job or not)
• Labour Mobility (6209.0, biennial) - provides information on the movements of people in and out of the labour force over a 12-month period. Note that this is not longitudinal, but relies on respondents memories.

HILDA

The main shortcoming of products from the LFS (and its supplementary surveys) is that they only have very limited longitudinal information. A better recent source of longitudinal data comes from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics, Australia (HILDA) survey, conducted by the Melbourne Institute. The HILDA website page, on their site, can be found here. HILDA contains most of the data items in the LFS, as well as many other social and income indicators, and is conducted longitudinally - that is, it goes back to the same respondents each year, enabling users of the data to get an idea of how people's situations change over time. The shortcomings of HILDA is that it has a considerably smaller sample than the LFS (around 10,000 or 20,000, depending on the data item, compared with more than 60,000 for the LFS), and that it only commenced in 2001 (the core employment and unemployment series from the LFS are available monthly, more or less comparably, back to February 1978, and quarterly back to 1966 - although comparability starts to become an issue the further back from 1978 the series goes).

Another thing to be aware of with HILDA is that it's not available in standard spreadsheets or datacubes, but rather requires heavier-duty software like SAS or SPSS to run it, which requires both knowledge and money, and that it's not a simple download. Researchers must fill out an application form and have their use approved, which can take a number of weeks to process.

Private Sector Sources

There are a number of private sector sources of information on the labour market, although most draw in some way from ABS data. Sources include:

• IBIS World - produce numerous reports on individual industry sectors (and smaller) of the Australian economy. There is a generally a charge for each report.