Cuba:

1.Title of the survey:

National Occupation Survey (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación).

2.Organization responsible for the survey:

State Committee of Statistics, Institute of Statistical Investigation (Comité Estatal de Estadísticas, Instituto de Investigaciones Estadísticas).

3.Coverage of the survey:

(a) Geographical:

(b) Persons covered:

1. persons who, for reasons connected with their work or study, often sleep away from home (members of the FAR, SMG, mobilised persons, EJT and military personnel);
2. members of the diplomatic corps and their families who are temporarily abroad;
3. persons engaged in international work or functions;
4. persons absent from their dwelling because they are under preventive arrest and subject to precautionary measures;
5. merchant seamen, fishermen, air crew, etc., resident in the country who are in Cuban territorial waters or abroad at the time of the survey;
6. persons temporarily confined in medical centres in which patients do not stay permanently.

The following are excluded from the permanent population:

1. Residents in collective households, permanently resident in hospitals, sanatoria, etc.;
2. foreigners temporarily in Cuba for various reasons such as study, medical treatment, tourism, or business, and not usually resident in Cuba;
3. members of the diplomatic corps accredited to Cuba, and members of their family.

Persons aged under 15 years are excluded from the survey.

4.Periodicity of the survey:

The survey has been a permanent one since 1984, and is conducted quarterly.

5.Reference period:

The week (from Sunday to Saturday) prior to the day of the interview.

6.Topics covered:

The survey provides information on employment, unemployment, hours of work, duration of unemployment, discouraged workers, industry, occupation, status in employment, and level of education.

7.Concepts and definitions:

(a) Employment:

In principle working age has been fixed at 17 years, but some young people aged between 15 and 16 are working because of special circumstances. There are few such cases and they are authorised by the State Committee on Labour and Social Security. No upper age limit has been set to working age for employed persons.

Considered as employed are:

1. full-time or part-time workers who looked for another job during the reference period;
2. persons who worked at least eight hours in the reference period, while being pensioned for reasons of age or partial disability;
3. private domestic servants;
4. paid and unpaid family workers who worked at least eight hours during the reference week;
5. members of producers' co-operatives;
6. exchanged workers;
7. members of the armed forces (career and volunteer members and conscripts).

Paid apprentices and paid trainees who by reason of the exigencies of the workplace are undergoing training in Cuba or abroad but have not lost their formal job attachment are considered as employed and are paid accordingly. However, persons undergoing training on a course run by an organisation or enterprise and who are accordingly paid a stipend, but have no formal job attachment to that organisation, are considered as "undergoing training" and are classified in the non-economically active population.

Excluded from the employed are persons engaged only in their own housework or persons doing unpaid voluntary social work.

In Cuba, full-time students spend all their time studying and do not work - there are no part-time students; that term is understood as meaning a full-time worker who studies outside working hours.

(b) Underemployment:

(c) Unemployment:

For the purposes of measuring unemployment, working age is considered to be from 17 to 54 years for women and from 17 to 59 years for men.

The reference period is considered to be the week before the day of the interview. However, persons who took no direct steps to look for work during the reference period because they or a member of their family was ill, but who did take such steps during the three weeks prior to the reference period, are still regarded as unemployed.

For the purposes of the survey, persons are regarded as looking for work when they make direct approaches to the Direcciones Municipales del Trabajo del Poder Popular (popular authorities' municipal labour exchanges), or to subsidised enterprises or units, or through personal contacts, to obtain paid work, or apply for a permit or licence to work on their own account, or are awaiting the result of such approaches, provided they are willing to accept the work they are looking for or other similar work if it is offered.

Also considered as unemployed are persons without a job who are available for work and who did not look for work during the reference period because they had made arrangements in the three weeks before that period to begin work at a new job later on.

Persons laid off temporarily or for an indefinite period without pay are not investigated.

The population not economically active comprises all persons aged 15 years and over who have no formal job attachment and are not looking for work. It includes: students; persons receiving pensions; persons of independent means; persons engaged only in their own housework; persons incapacitated for work; persons who are not of working age and neither work nor study, etc.

(d) Hours of work:

(e) Informal sector:

(f) Usual activity:

8.Classifications used:

(a) Industry:

The CAE is compatible with the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC-1968).

(b) Occupation:

(c) Status in employment:

1. State-employed workers, i.e., persons working in a state-subsidised enterprise, union or unit, whether national, provincial or municipal. In practice this includes employees of political and mass organisations at all levels, and members of the armed forces;
2. Private employees, i.e., persons working at a private workplace for wage, salary, commission or payment by results. This includes persons working in a private family business for payment (cash or kind) similar to that of any other worker. It also includes priests and other clergy of various denominations if they regularly perform services of this kind, or educational services, etc. and receive income (in the form of donations or other income);
3. Members of co-operatives, i.e. persons previously known as "small farmers", their family workers or farm workers who have formed agricultural producers' co-operatives (CPA), including members of fishermen's and coalminers' co-operatives;
4. Small farmers, i.e., persons who work their own land as owner or usufructuary, with or without employees, and members of credit and service co-operatives (CCS);
5. Own-account workers who do not employ workers for wage or salary but may use the assistance of an unpaid family worker. This category includes persons running small businesses with the help of on domestic employees, teachers working at home, secretaries, drivers, gardeners, etc., who do not run a business;
6. Unpaid family workers who worked for at least eight hours during the reference week.

This classification is compatible with the International Classification of Status of Employment (ICSE).

(d) Level of education/qualifications:

1. No completed level;
2. Uncompleted primary (from the first to the fifth grade of General Education or levels 11, 12 and 21 of Workers'/Peasants' Education);
3. Completed primary (from the first to the fifth grade of General Education or levels 11, 12, 21 and 22 of Workers'/Peasants' Education);
4. Completed basic secondary (second level of education - Basic Intermediary);
5. Completely qualified worker (vocational basic intermediate level of technical and vocational education);
6. Completed pre-university (higher intermediate);
7. Completed intermediate technical (higher intermediate level of technical and vocational education);
8. Completed teachers' training college (except university);
9. Higher university (third level of the national educational system).

9.Sample size and design:

(a) The sample frame:

The dwellings in the selected districts are completely updated every two years. The first updating was begun in the last quarter of 1985 on the basis of map records and computer lists of dwellings for each district, which were revised on the spot and adjusted in the files later, in 1985-1986.

It has been decided to make no changes in the districts constituting the Master Sample until the next CPV. Only exceptionally, when they disappear or when all the dwellings in the sample have been used in that sample, will districts be replaced.

The selection procedure is automatic and based on the information provided by the 1981 CPV registered on magnetic tape. The guides to the dwellings to be visited are printed directly by computer.

(b) The sample:

The total sampling fraction in Cuba is approximately 9 per thousand of the population.

There are three stages of selection for the urban part of the country and four for the rural part, excepting the province of Ciudad de La Habana (Havana City).

The selection stages for the urban part are:

1. First-stage units (PSUs): urban inhabited places, selected with probability proportional to the number of dwellings and following the rule of taking between 1/3 and 1/2 of such places in each province;
2. Second-stage units (SSUs): districts, selected with a probability proportional to the number of dwellings;
3. Third-stage units (USUs): dwellings, selected with equal probabilities.

and for the rural part:

1. PSUs: rural census areas, selected with probability proportional to the number of dwellings and following the rule of not taking more than one-fifth of such areas in each province.
2. SSUs: districts, selected with probability proportional to the number of dwellings;
3. TSUs: segments, selected with equal probabilities;
4. USUs: dwellings, selected with equal probabilities.

For the province of Havana City, they are:

1. PSUs: districts, selected with probability proportional to the number of dwellings;
2. USUs: dwellings, selected with equal probabilities. Eight dwellings per district are selected.

The study or enumeration units are the nuclear families living in the dwellings selected in the sample.

The country has been stratified in provinces and parts (urban and rural). The total number of strata is 29; the urban part is divided into five substrata; the rural part of the province is not divided into substrata; and the Havana City province was substratified into its 15 municipalities.

The rules whereby the sample is stratified are a compromise between a proportional and a uniform stratification. The result is an adjusted self-weighted sample. The procedure used to adjust the self-weighting consisted in fixing a minimum number of persons to be sampled by strata, in order to obtain annual estimates of some disaggregation with errors of less than 10 per cent, and on this basis, following the principle of proportionality, proceeding to adjust these sizes for each province and part. The number of persons per stratum having been fixed, their corresponding sampling fractions were obtained and also an approximation of the distribution of dwellings in each stratum, and the distribution of districts following the rule that at most eight dwellings per district would be taken. The sample within the province for urban substrata was fixed by following the rule of proportionality. For the rural part a second and more refined approximation of the sample of districts within the PSUs was obtained from the sampling fractions, considering them as constant and uniform in each stratum.

(c) Rotation:

The sample of the periods to be compared contains a common part equal to a fraction of one-half.

Furthermore, in each province districts are grouped by months in such a way that the dwellings in each district are interviewed in the assigned month of the quarter. Every month, 1/3 of the district and 1/3 of the dwellings in the sample take part.

10.Field work:

(a) Data collection:

(b) Substitution of ultimate sampling units:

11.Quality controls:

In each province there is a revision team composed of the official responsible for the sample, an office worker and a supervisor. When the data are processed, confirmation and automatic imputation, visual revision of part of the indicators showing error, and manual imputation take place.

A study of sample errors is made and their causes noted. A register of interviewers' errors and supervisors' revisions is kept. A register is also kept of supervisors' errors detected when data are revised by the office workers. In addition, the data centres keep registers for each province of the type of error in each question and the results of the confirmation, correction and automated imputation.

12.Weighting the sample:

In order to expand the survey results to the level of the total population, estimators are used separately for each part of the country (urban, rural and province of Havana City) and refer to totals, averages and rates or ratios.

13.Sampling errors:

Sampling errors are computed for the employment and unemployment rates for each province, urban and rural part, and sex.

14.Adjustments:

(a) Population not covered:

(b) Under/overcoverage:

(c) Non-response:

Cases of non-response are taken into account in the method of estimation by using ratio estimators.

15.Seasonal adjustment:

The National Occupation Survey is a comparatively recent one, and there is accordingly not yet sufficient information to make a study of seasonal variations.

16.Non-sampling errors:

The information is not available.

17.History of the survey:

The National Occupation Survey is part of the System of Surveys of Level of Living (SENV) that has been carried out since 1984. The SENV comprises permanent surveys (the Family Budget Survey and the National Occupation Survey), periodical surveys supplementing the above surveys and carried out at regular intervals between censuses, and ad hoc occasional surveys.

The National Occupation Survey was amended in 1988, inter alia to ascertain how many members of the non-economically active population were willing to work, and the number of unemployed.

18.Documentation:

For the latest results of the survey, see:

Comité Estatal de Estadísticas: "Principales Indicadores - Enero-septiembre de 1988" (Main indicators - January-September 1988) (Havana); presents quarterly results.

idem: "Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación - Enero-diciembre de 1988" (National Occupation Survey - January-December 1988) (annual) (ibid.).

For methodological details of the sample design, see:

idem: "Diseño Muestral General para el Sistema de Encuestas de Nivel de Vida" (Havana, 1986).