Estimation models used in 2021 Permanent Population Census: Current activity status, Occupation, Industry and Status in employment.

Abstract

Every year, Istat is involved in Census estimates production, which is obtained by integrating sample data with information from administrative sources. As regards the production of labour estimates, Istat produces Current activity status estimates for Italian dissemination. In 2023, in addition to these estimates, to comply with EU regulations, referred to the year 2021, estimates for Occupation, Industry and Status in employment were also produced. The estimation process for Employed/Not Employed is already well documented. For this reason, the procedure for estimating the Unemployed and Outside the labour force (students, retired people, housewives, other) and the variables related to Occupation, Industry and Status in employment will be here described. The estimates of these variables were produced at municipal level. The estimation models were implemented in R software through the ‘multinom’ function included in the ‘nnet’ package which allows to fit multinomial log-linear models using neural networks. The article aims to describe the different estimation models and the procedures used for choosing and defining the auxiliary variables included in the models. The administrative sources used were mainly social welfare and income sources and they allowed to identify ‘work signs’ of each individual.