Application Case I: Labour Force Statistics — Harmonizing Official Statistics Data

Abstract

For apparent reasons, official statistics, with its huge data repositories compiled over long periods of time against changing backgrounds and comprising datasets interrelated in multifarious ways, provides an ideal testing site for the ideas and methodology developed in the MeTaStaSys framework for statistical data integration. As a particular application example, European labour force statistics is chosen in this chapter to illustrate in an exemplary way how data harmonization might be accomplished technically. There are several reasons suggesting the choice of this subject domain, not the least of which being the practical importance of employment statistics in political decision making against the background of a profound structural economic change taking place currently on a global scale transforming industrial societies into what is frequently termed the “global information society”. Devising effective policies at European Union level obviously depends on integrated statistics to a large extent, calling into question the traditional means and approaches in fusing mainly national employment data into EUropean-wide data aggregates.