Bolivia

1.Title of the survey:

Integrated Household Survey (Encuesta Integrada de Hogares - EIH).

2.Organization responsible for the survey:

National Institute of Statistics, Area of Social Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Area de Estadísticas Sociales).

3.Coverage of the survey:

(a) Geographical:

The nine departmental capitals: La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Sucre, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, Trinidad and Cobija; and the town of El Alto, which is separate from La Paz.

(b) Persons covered:

All persons living in private households. Included as members of the household are persons who live in it for longer than three months but are not blood relatives of its members, domestic servants living in the household, etc.

Excluded are collective households (barracks, convents, hotels, etc.). Information on the armed forces is not collected.

The economically active population comprises persons aged 10 years and over.

4.Periodicity of the survey:

The survey was first conducted in February/March 1989 and is intended to take place half-yearly (see History of the Survey, below).

5.Reference period:

The calendar week preceding the interview.

6.Topics covered:

The survey provides information on employment, unemployment, hours of work, type of wage, income in the main and secondary activity, duration of employment and unemployment, discouraged and occasional workers, industry, occupation, status in employment and level of education. It is also possible to estimate underemployment from the data on hours of work, income and job seeking.

The EIH is a polythematic survey. It collects information on persons' activity and other topics in the same unit of investigation, such as rural-urban and urban-urban migration, education (rates of literacy, school attendance, languages in common use, etc.) and housing (tenancy and building materials, services provided, etc.).

7.Concepts and definitions:

(a) Employment:

"The employed population comprises all persons aged 10 years and over who worked at least one hour during the reference week. Included in this category are all persons who were:
  1. working for a salary, wage or other kind of income in an activity,
  2. working without being paid (including unpaid family workers),
  3. in employment or a job, but who did not work during the reference week because they were on holiday or leave or in other similar circumstances, including illness or injury, maternity or paternity leave, educational leave (if the person concerned is following a course of study and is in receipt of an income for that purpose), absence without leave (always provided that the person does not claim to have lost his/her job on that account), labour-management dispute, mechanical breakdowns, etc."

Also included are:

  1. full- and part-time workers seeking other work during the reference week;
  2. persons who performed some work for pay or profit during the reference week, while being subject to compulsory schooling, or retired and receiving a pension;
  3. full- and part-time students working full- or part-time;
  4. paid and unpaid apprentices and trainees, if their apprenticeship is in a center or establishment that is a usual workplace;
  5. participants in employment promotion schemes;
  6. private domestic servants;
  7. members of producers' co-operatives, if they worked in their co-operative in the reference period. If they are merely members who derive income from shares or sales of property, they are considered as inactive;
  8. persons doing unpaid community or social work;
  9. volunteer and career members of the armed forces.

Excluded from the employed and considered as inactive are:

  1. paid or unpaid apprentices and persons on regular training courses;
  2. unpaid family workers temporarily absent from work;
  3. persons only engaged in their own housework (housewives);
  4. conscripts and members of civilian services equivalent to military service.

(b) Underemployment:

The survey does not provide full information on underemployment, but only indicates conclusions that may be drawn from its information on hours of work, income and job seeking.

(c) Unemployment:

"The unemployed population comprises all persons aged 10 years and over who, during the reference week, did not work but were actively looking for work or awaiting an opportunity to offer goods or services as self-employed or as independent professional workers."

The unemployed are divided into:

Also considered as unemployed are:

  1. persons laid off temporarily or for an indefinite period without pay;
  2. persons without work and available for work, who have made arrangements to start work in a new job at a date after the reference period (no time limit is set for the new job to begin);
  3. full- and part-time students seeking full- or part-time work.

Steps taken to find work are not investigated, but periods of unemployment between jobs, and job search periods, are investigated.

The EIH does not cover seasonal workers awaiting agricultural or other seasonal work, as the survey does not cover work in rural areas, but if such workers look for work in town they are classified as unemployed.

Persons willing to offer their services but who did not do so in the reference period because they thought it was impossible to get a job are excluded from the unemployed and considered as inactive. They are known as "discouraged workers".

(d) Hours of work:

This means usual hours, but for self-employed workers may approximate to hours actually worked. The average hours per day and average days per week in the main and secondary activities are ascertained and converted into hours per week. Average hours and days are those the employed person considers as such, and include overtime hours of attendance, and normal and abnormal periods of work.

The only hours investigated and reckoned as hours of work are those actually spent on the activity within the workplace or work station, including the time at work of self-employed workers and excluding travel time to and from work. The interviewee also states the number of hours' overtime spent in his/her activity, whether he/she works on public holidays or feast days, etc. Holidays for persons employed on "formal" activities are considered as part of the period of work.

(e) Informal sector:

No specific treatment is given, but inferences may be drawn from family workers and/or self-employed workers.

(f) Usual activity:

Data on the usual activity are obtainable from data on seniority at work. Employment record data are not handled.

8.Classifications used:

Employed and unemployed persons are classified by industry and occupation. Employed persons only are classified by status in employment and all persons aged 6 years and over who are covered by the survey are classified by level of education.

(a) Industry:

Coding is done to the 2-digit level, using the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC-1968), with nine major divisions and 33 divisions.

(b) Occupation:

Occupations are classified in accordance with the Occupational Classification for the Census of America (COTA-1970), which divides occupations into 11 categories or groups, with 89 three-digit subgroups. The nine categories of this classification are regrouped into the following three categories:
  1. White collar workers (COAT categories 1-3), comprising professional workers, public administration officials, other office workers, managers, directors, etc.
  2. Production workers: this category covers COTA categories 4 and 6-8, comprising manual workers in handicrafts, factory hands, etc.
  3. Workers in services: this category covers COTA categories 5 and 9, which correspond by and large to workers in services, and workmen and drivers employed on heavy machinery and general transport equipment.

COTA is convertible to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-1968).

(c) Status in employment:

This relates to the individual worker's position in his work hierarchy. That position determines how he is paid, the kind of work he does, his links with the market, use of secondary labour, etc. The occupational categories concerned are:
  1. Employees: wage earners and salaried employees, and domestic employees;
  2. Self-employed: owners employing labour, independent professional workers and own-account workers;
  3. Unpaid workers: unpaid apprentices and unpaid family workers.

(d) Level of education/qualifications:

The level of education is classified in the following groups:
  1. None,
  2. Basic,
  3. Intermediate,
  4. Medium,
  5. Technical education,
  6. Teachers' training college education,
  7. University education,
  8. Others.

9.Sample size and design:

(a) The sample frame:

It is provided by the cartography of the latest Population and Housing Census, which mapped and divided into blocks all the major populated centres, the capital cities and other important towns in the country.

(b) The sample:

The sample is based on a two-stage simple random sample design. Taking the rate of unemployment as a random variable, the size of the independent sample for each town is first fixed. Certain blocks (primary sampling units) are then selected from the sample frame. At the second stage households are selected within the blocks as elementary units of investigation.

The size of the sample is approximately 5,000 households, giving an average total of 25,000 persons.

(c) Rotation:

Rotation is not applied.

10.Field work:

(a) Data collection:

Data are obtained by direct interview in the household from each and every one of its members. There is a permanent basic survey team, but the interviewers, supervisors and other staff are engaged by contract for each survey. Data collection takes 15 consecutive days for each of the capital cities, by interviews lasting on average 45 minutes.

(b) Substitution of ultimate sampling units:

The final units (households) are replaced when more than 50 per cent of the dwellings selected in the measure of size within the respective block are unoccupied or refuse response, or when there is no contact with their occupants.

11.Quality controls:

Field work is supervised by specialist staff using separate systems of checking and scrutiny, as follows:

  1. by observation - the supervisor accompanies, observes, corrects and helps the interviewer during the interview (there is one supervisor for every four interviewers);
  2. by reinterview - the supervisor interviews a number of households that have previously been surveyed and compares his results with the previous ones;
  3. by checking - a return visit is made to a number of households previously interviewed, with the questionnaire filled in at the previous interview, and a number of topics and questions put by the survey are checked.

Each and every questionnaire is subjected to critical examination and coding before being transcribed with a validation programme and processed by the ARIEL + PLUS programme in a mini-computer. This programme detects errors and inconsistencies.

12.Weighting the sample:

The results are expanded by expansion coefficients in which the sampling fraction and rate of coverage are estimated from the global data held on the population of each town, taking into account the respective sample sizes, whilst the rate of response is calculated from the actual results of the survey as regards acceptance and response.

13.Sampling errors:

The results of the 1989 survey are not available yet.

14.Adjustments:

(a) Population not covered:

No adjustment is made.

(b) Under/overcoverage:

Not available for the 1989 survey. The 1988 Permanent Household Survey showed a 1 per cent error in its estimate of the projection of the aggregate population of the nine capital cities.

(c) Non-response:

This may be measured from the rate of response, which varies from one town to another between 0.83 and 0.98 per cent of the total number of households selected. In this connection the replacement system under paragraph 10, subparagraph (b) should be borne in mind.

15.Seasonal adjustment:

No seasonal adjustment is made to the survey results. Efforts are being made to fix the dates of the surveys in such a way that they reflect seasonal variations.

16.Non-sampling errors:

Not available.

17.History of the survey:

The Integrated Household Survey was conducted for the first time in February/March 1989. Its forerunners were the Permanent Household Surveys (Encuestas Permanentes de Hogares - EPH) made by the National Institute of Statistics between 1980 and 1988, with a different coverage.

The coverage of the EPH was different because, due to limited funds and other restrictions, some surveys covered all the capital cities in the country, some only the cities of the "central axis" (La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz) including Oruro, and others excluded a number of capitals in Eastern Bolivia such as Cobija and Trinidad.

Moreover, although the surveys were made annually, the months in which information was collected were different in the various years, because of seasonal or cyclical factors relating to the coverage of employment. Also, the categories and concepts tried out as indicators were not uniform over time (e.g., the employed population was considered as including persons who during the reference week worked in an occupation for payment in cash or kind for more than 12 hours weekly, including unpaid family workers). Occasional attempts were made to follow a number of EPH indicators every month and/or quarter, but this periodicity never became a regular system. The only results available from 1982 to 1988 are therefore annual ones.

It is planned to make the next EIH in the same capital cities, the town of El Alto and population centres of 10,000 and more inhabitants, with the object of also covering the rural area at peasant community level in the medium term.

18.Documentation:

The publications relating to the 1989 EIH are still in course of preparation, as the results are being processed. The aim is to obtain the results about three months after the survey.

For information on the former Permanent Household Survey, see:

Instituto Nacional de Estadística: "Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, 1988" (Permanent Household Survey, 1988) (La Paz).

idem: "Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, 1987" (ibid.).

idem: "Serie EPH 1980-1986" (Permanent Household Surveys 1980-1986) (ibid.)

Besides the results summarised in these publications, information is available on diskettes for each individual departmental capital city and for the whole of Bolivia.