Abraham, Rosa and Shrivastava, Anand
(2022)
How Comparable are India’s labour market
surveys?
Working Paper.
Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
Abstract
The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s (CMIE) Consumer Pyramid Household surveys
have emerged as an important source of regular labour market data for India. Given the
differences in methods in data collection between the CMIE and official employment sources, it
becomes exceedingly important to establish some comparability between the government and
the CMIE datasets. With the release of the official labour surveys, Periodic Labour Force
Surveys for 2017-18, we now have an overlap between the official datasets and CMIE datasets.
In this paper, we examine the extent of comparability of labour force estimates from these two
datasets. We find that employment estimates for men are broadly comparable. However, for
women, there is a consistent divergence with CMIE estimates of women’s workforce
participation lower than that of NSS-PLFS. We explore the points of divergence in the
measurement of women’s work and hypothesise some potential reasons for this difference. We
find that irrespective of the reference period used in the PLFS estimation of employment
statuses, there is no convergence with the CMIE employment estimate for women’s
employment. Moreover, the mismatch in CMIE-PLFS estimates occurs across all types of
women’s employment and irrespective of what reference period of employment (in official data)
is used.
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