Abstract
The statistics in this section cover a wide range of topics and come from a variety of sources. The occupation data for periods up to the 1960s were almost entirely derived by Professor Bairoch and his colleagues from national censuses of population. Therefore the problems of accuracy referred to in the last section also appear here. A more significant difficulty is the very considerable variations which have occurred in classifications, both between countries and over time. The distinction between an occupational and an industrial classification was seldom properly appreciated until well into the twentieth century. The treatment of retired persons was very variable, and so also was that of women working in agriculture or in other family-based economic units. When Jacques Bertillon came to put together his volume on nineteenth-century European population censuses for the International Institute of Statistics in 1899, he expressed the view that “the nomenclatures adopted by the different countries are so different that international comparisons would have been either very difficult or fallacious”.1 Professor Bairoch’s group, having made every possible effort to achieve international and intertemporal comparability, in effect echo Bertillon, when they write that “because of the frequent changes in criteria and methods used in census taking.… it is practically impossible to come up with statistics that are perfectly comparable in time and space”.2 Rough comparisons of orders of magnitude are feasible, however, and the degree of precision has certainly improved over the last forty years, though differences between centrally-planned and market economies still need to be interpreted with great care.
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Notes
J. Bertillon, Statistique internationale des rencensements de la population…(Paris, 1899).
P. Bairoch et al, La population active et sa structure (Brussels, 1968)
For a discussion of the problems affecting the user of the British statistics, see W.R. Garside, The Measurement of Unemployment (Oxford, 1980).
A small beginning has been made in Peter Scholliers (ed.), Real Wages in 19th and 20th Century Europe: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York, etc., 1989), especially in the contribution by V. Zamagni.
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Mitchell, B.R. (1998). Labour Force. In: International Historical Statistics. International Historical Statistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14735-9_2
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