Philippines (2)

Title of the survey

Annual Survey of Establishments (ASE)

Organization responsible

National Statistics Office (NSO)

Periodicity of the survey

Annual.

Objectives of the survey

The ASE is conducted during intercensal years to provide statistics on the structure, level and trend of economic activities in the country. It provides data used for national accounts purposes (e.g. input and output and gross domestic product).

Main labour topics covered by the survey

Employment, wages and salaries and compensation of employees, and hours of work of production or construction workers.

Reference period

Employment: the pay period nearest the 15th of the middle month of each quarter of the year.

Wages and salaries and compensation of employees: the whole year.

Hours of work: every quarter of the year.

Coverage of the survey

Geographical

The whole country.

Industrial

All branches of economic activity, except public administration and defence, public education services at the elementary and secondary levels and other vocational schools below collegiate level, business, professional and labor associations, civic and religious organizations, foreign diplomatic missions, international organizations and other extraterritorial bodies.

Establishments

Registered establishments of all types and sizes, except the following:

Persons

All persons engaged, including working owners and unpaid workers, as well as homeworkers in manufacturing.

Occupations

Data are not collected on individual occupations.

Concepts and definitions

Employment

Data are collected on total employment and average employment, by sex and separately for various categories of persons engaged.

Total employment refers to the total number of persons who worked in or for the establishment during the pay periods nearest the 15th of each reference month.

Itemized employees are employees whose positions are on the personnel listings (plantillas); they include full- and part-time employees, employees on sick or maternity leave and on paid vacation or holiday, and employees working away from the establishment and paid by or under the control of the establishment. Consultants, tenants (in agriculture), homeworkers (except in manufacturing), piece workers, employees based overseas and workers receiving commissions only are excluded.

Managers, executives and supervisors are salaried directors, managers, executives and other administrative and technical supervisors (in the industrial sector, above foreman level). Included are working owners receiving a regular salary. Excluded are managers paid solely for their attendance at meetings of the board of directors, and executives and other officers of the same category.

In public education and health services, executives are salaried directors, presidents, vice-presidents, deans and other officers of the same category. Included are itemized employees authorized to claim computable or reimbursable representation and travelling expenses.

Non-itemized employees are those whose positions are not on the personnel listings. Included are contractual, emergency or casual employees and paid students and assistants.

Agricultural workers are all workers directly engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry, poultry and other agricultural activities, including incidental industrial or research workers. A distinction is made between:

Forestry workers are those directly engaged in logging operations and in development harvesting and conservation of forest resources.

Fishery workers are those directly engaged in fishing and culturing fish and aquatic products and other fishery activities.

Production workers are industrial workers and foremen directly engaged in production.

Construction workers are carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, etc.

All other employees include clerks, typists, salesmen, apprentices and learners receiving regular pay.

Working owners are owners actively engaged in the management of the establishment, who do not receive regular pay. Silent or inactive partners are excluded.

Unpaid workers are persons working without regular pay for at least one third of the normal working time in the establishment.

Earnings

Data are collected on total wages and salaries paid to all paid employees during the year, as part of compensation of employees (see below).

Wages and salaries include: total basic pay and all payments in cash or in kind, prior to deductions for employees' contributions to social security and assimilated funds, withholding tax, etc.; vacation, sick and maternity leave pay; overtime pay; and other benefits (bonuses, food, housing, cost-of-living allowances, commutable transportation and representation allowances, commissions paid to salaried employees, separation, retirement and terminal pay, gratuities, etc.).

Excluded are reimbursable transportation and representation allowances, and the cost of uniform and working clothes.

Data are collected separately on:

for each of the main categories of workers (i.e. managers, executives and supervisors; production, construction, agricultural, forestry, etc. workers; and all other employees). Data are not collected by sex.

Wage/salary rates

Not relevant.

COMP comprises:

Hours of work

Data are collected on the total number of hours actually worked during the year by production or construction workers only (i.e. in mining and quarrying, manufacturing, electricity, gas and water, and in construction).

Hours actually worked include overtime and waiting time, and exclude time for paid sick leave and paid vacation leave.

Data are collected for each quarter of the year and by sex.

International recommendations

The definition and components of wages and salaries used in this survey serve the purposes of national accounts. They conform to the international guidelines on earnings, except that severance and termination pay, which is normally excluded from earnings, is included.

The definition of compensation of employees used in this survey conforms to the System of National Accounts (SNA), 1968.

The definition of hours of work used in this survey conforms to the international guidelines on hours actually worked.

Classifications

Components of labour cost / compensation of employees

None.

Industrial

The Philippine Standard Industrial Classification (PSIC) is used, which is linked to the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic activities (ISIC), Rev.2, 1968 at the four-digit level.

Occupational

Not relevant.

Others

The survey data are also classified by region and employment size.

Sample size and design

Statistical unit

The sampling unit is the establishment, i.e. an economic unit which engages, under a single ownership or control, in one or predominantly one kind of economic activity at a fixed single location (e.g. a factory, mine, plant, bank, restaurant, school, supermarket, barber or beauty shop).

Survey universe / sample frame

A Listing of Establishments which covers all types and sizes of registered establishments. For the 1989 survey, the Listing covered 22,300 establishments.

The frame is updated every year using information from administrative records such as reports from the Security and Exchange Commission, reports from current establishment surveys, by field enumeration and from the results of the five-yearly census of establishments.

Sample design

The ASE uses stratified simple random sampling. Establishments are stratified by region, by three- and four-digit PSIC code (depending on the division of economic activity) and by employment size.

All establishments with 50 or more persons engaged are included in the sample. In agriculture and forestry, fishery, mining and quarrying, electricity, gas and water, construction, transport, storage and communication (except in a few three-digit groups) and in public services, all establishments, regardless of employment size, are also included with certainty in the sample.

In the other sectors (i.e. in manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, banking and finance, private services and a few three-digit groups in transport), for each three- or four-digit PSIC code, sample establishments are drawn using, in general, the following sampling fractions:

A minimum sample of two and a maximum of ten establishments is taken from each cell. If a cell has only one or two establishments, both are selected for the sample.

The survey covers 6.5 per cent of all establishments. The sample is renewed each year.

Field work

Data collection

The survey is conducted through personal interviews by field personnel of the National Statistics Office (NSO), during the fourth quarter of the year following the reference year.

Survey questionnaire

The survey questionnaire aims at collecting data on the characteristics and activity of establishments (gross revenue, cost, value of fixed assets, capital expenditures, etc.). Four sections are relevant to the measurement of employment, compensation of employees and hours of work: Instructions relating to definitions, inclusions and exclusions appear next to each column in the questionnaire. A manual of instructions is also available to the interviewers.

Substitution of sampling units

No substitution is applied. In the case of non-responding establishments, the data are imputed on the basis of previous reports from these establishments or reports of responding establishments with similar characteristics.

Data processing and editing

Data are first field-edited manually by field workers while still in the establishment, in order to minimize recontacting the establishments later on. Then the questionnaires are transmitted to the sector specialists for manual verification, and sent to the Electronic Data Processing Staff for machine editing and tabulation. Built-in codes are provided for each item in the questionnaire, and specific items (such as products and materials reported by establishments in the industrial sector) are coded manually. Data are coded and edited simultaneously.

Inconsistent data are followed up through telephone calls or personal visits to the establishments. Consistency checks are made to verify the correctness of the data. These include internal consistency checks (to ensure that the various items in the questionnaire bear reasonable relationship with each other, with regard to industry classification, region, average wage and salary ratios, and other parameters), and external consistency checks (to ensure that the levels of data are comparable with those of the previous surveys).

Types of estimates

Construction of indices

None.

Weighting of sample results

Estimates for the non-certainty strata are obtained either by simple expansion, i.e. by multiplying the sample results, at the level of each stratum, by a weighting factor which is the reciprocal of the sampling fraction, or by giving to each observation an integer weight as follows:

Adjustments

Non-response

Non-response is taken into account in the estimation procedure.

Other bias

None.

Use of benchmark data

None.

Seasonal variations

None.

Indicators of reliability of the estimates

Coverage of the sampling frame

Not available.

Sampling error / sampling variance

The sampling variance is calculated as:

where r=mod(N,n)=0, or

where r=mod(N,n)¬=0.

The variance is adjusted by the finite population correction factor:

Non-response rate

In 1989, it was approximately 10 per cent in terms of number of establishments.

Non-sampling errors

Some errors may occur, due to changes in employment size of establishments or changes of address.

Conformity with other sources

A comparison is made, by industry and regional classification, with the results of the previous year's survey.

Available series

Published tables include: by industry major group, separately for the industrial and non-industrial sectors. Other cross tabulations are prepared by industry major group and revenue, costs, fixed assets, capital expenditure, book value, etc., separately for the industrial and non-industrial sectors.

History of the survey

The forerunner of the current Annual Survey of Establishments was the 1956 Annual Survey of Manufactures. At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, additional surveys were introduced, which gradually covered all branches of economic activity.

During the first years, the scope of the surveys varied with the sector covered (e.g. in manufacturing, between 1956 and 1974, the survey covered only establishments with five or more workers; after the 1975 Census of Establishments, the coverage was expanded to include all known establishments with one or more persons engaged, for 1976 to 1982. After the 1983 Census of Establishments, a decision was made to include only establishments with ten or more workers. Similar changes occurred in the other sectors covered by the survey. Since 1984 (data for 1983), the ASE has usually covered establishments with ten or more workers (except in mining and quarrying). The ASE was not conducted in census years (1972, 1975, 1978, 1983 and 1988); for these years, the statistics cover all establishments of all sizes.

Over the years, new items of information have been included in the questionnaire and the questionnaires themselves have been redesigned. The current ASE is an integrated survey which uses the same basic questionnaire for all industries and services, with specific items for each sector (e.g. with regard to categories and types of workers, measurement of hours of work, etc.).

Before 1978, industry classification was based on ISIC. Since 1979, the survey has used the PSIC.

Documentation

National Statistics Office: Annual Survey of Establishments (annual, Manila). The publication consists of four volumes: for mining and quarrying, electricity, gas and water, and construction; for manufacturing; for wholesale and retail trade; and for non-industrial sectors combined. It is published about two years after the reference period of the survey. The survey results may also be made available on diskette, upon request.

Confidentiality / Reliability criteria

The survey is conducted under the Commonwealth Act No. 591, which defines the functions of the Bureau of the Census and Statistics (now the National Statistics Office), specifies the obligations of respondents in statistical inquiries, and ensures the confidentiality of the information collected. Under the confidentiality rule, data must be published in the form of summaries or statistical tables in which no reference to an individual, corporation, association, partnership, institution or business enterprise shall appear. Extracts of this Act form part of the survey questionnaires.

Other information

Data supplied to the ILO for publication

The following data are published in the Yearbook of Labour Statistics: