Tunisia

1.Title of the survey:

National Employment Survey (Enquête nationale sur l'emploi).

2.Organization responsible for the survey:

The National Institute of Statistics (Institut national de la statistique) is responsible for organising the survey and collecting the data, and the Directorate of Demographic and Social Statistics (Direction des statistiques démographiques et sociales) for publishing the results.

3.Coverage of the survey:

(a) Geographical:

The whole country.

(b) Persons covered:

The whole of the resident population in ordinary households.

The survey excludes the population counted separately (i.e. persons who are living in hospitals, asylums, prisons, barracks, boarding establishments, etc.) and persons of Tunisian nationality resident abroad.

4.Periodicity of the survey:

The survey is annual and has been conducted more or less regularly since 1976 (see History of the survey, below).

5.Reference period:

The week preceding the interview.

6.Topics covered:

The survey provides information on employment, unemployment, hours of work, employment in the informal sector, duration of employment and duration of unemployment, occasional workers, industry, occupation, status in employment, level of education/qualifications and usual activity.

7.Concepts and definitions:

(a) Employment:

Employed persons comprise all persons aged 15 years and over who worked for one hour or more during the reference week. The following categories are included:
  1. persons with a job but temporarily absent from work because of illness or injury, vacation or annual leave, maternity or paternity leave, educational leave, absence without leave, bad weather or mechanical breakdown, labour-management disputes or other reduction in economic activity;
  2. persons on temporary lay-off, who have a formal attachment to their job;
  3. full- and part-time workers seeking other work during the reference week;
  4. persons who did any work for pay or profit during the reference week while being retired and receiving a pension; or registered as jobseekers at an employment office, or receiving unemployment benefit;
  5. paid and unpaid apprentices and trainees;
  6. participants in employment promotion schemes;
  7. paid family workers;
  8. unpaid family workers who worked at least one day a week; and those who were temporarily absent from their work;
  9. private domestic servants;
  10. persons doing unpaid community or social work;
  11. volunteer and career members of the armed forces and conscripts, as well as persons doing civilian service equivalent to military service. Conscripts are not covered by the survey but added to the count after enumeration.

Excluded from the economically active population are full-time and part-time students working full or part time and persons whose only work is around the house.

(b) Underemployment:

This topic is not covered by the survey.

(c) Unemployment:

The unemployed are persons aged 18 to 59 years who did not work during the reference week for reasons other than sickness, leave, bad weather, etc. and who are available for work and looking for work.

Also included, but shown separately as 'other non-employed persons' are young people aged 15 to 17 years and persons aged 60 years and over, who satisfy the criteria of the unemployment definition.

"Looking for work" includes making contacts with the administrative authorities (either direct or by correspondance), registration with an employment agency, and other methods which must be stated (such as the jobseeker's own efforts).

The unemployed include:

  1. persons laid off for an indefinite period, without pay, who are available for work and looking for work;
  2. persons without a job and currently available for work who have made arrangements to start a new job on a date subsequent to the reference period (there is no time limit for starting the new job);
  3. persons without a job who are available for work but did not look for work during the reference period, being discouraged because no employment was available, or persons in rural areas who have only hazy ideas about looking for work;
  4. seasonal workers awaiting seasonal (agricultural or other) work, and share croppers.

Full-time and part-time students looking for full-time or part-time work are excluded from the unemployed, and considered as out of the labour force.

(d) Hours of work:

This refers to the number of days actually worked and the number of hours worked in the principal activity, during the reference week.

Hours worked include overtime actually worked, and exclude hours paid for but not worked, travelling time between home and workplace and hours lost because of illness, leave, partial unemployment, etc.

(e) Informal sector:

Beginning with the 1989 survey, employment in the informal sector is identified by three factors:
  1. the kind of enterprise in which the person works;
  2. the activity of the enterprise;
  3. the number of persons employed in the enterprise.

(f) Usual activity:

The survey includes questions on the principal usual activity and the persons surveyed are classified by their 'employment tempo', that is, according to whether they have permanent (full-time or part-time regular) employment, or non-permanent (full-time or part-time, occasional or seasonal) employment. The information gathered relates to the type of enterprise, occupation and status in employment. All the persons surveyed have to state the number of days they actually worked per week in the month preceding the survey. Only non-permanent workers have to say how many days they actually worked in the preceding year (data are collected in terms of number of days per season).

8.Classifications used:

Employed and unemployed persons are classified as follows:

(a) Industry:

The classification used is the short Classification of Activities (Nomenclature des activités abrégée) which is coded to the 2-digit level and structured according to 18 groups, six of them in industry. This classification is based on the Classification of Activities and Products (Nomenclature des Activités et Produits) which comprises 100 groups and is coded to the 4-digit level. It is convertible to the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC-1968).

(b) Occupation:

The classification used comprises eight groups and is convertible to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-1968).

(c) Status in employment:

The classification comprises five groups. It consists of a cross classification of merged socio-occupational categories, and is convertible to the International Standard Classification of Status in Employment (ICSE).

(d) Level of education/qualifications:

The classification by level of education comprises the following six levels:
  1. None,
  2. Koran kindergarden/pre-primary ('Kouted'),
  3. Primary education,
  4. Secondary education, subdivided into
    1. Professional secondary,
    2. Long secondary,
  5. Higher education.

It is convertible to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED-1976).

9.Sample size and design:

(a) The sample frame:

This is based on the 1984 Population Census, which divides the entire territory into districts or geographical areas of between 80 and 100 households in urban and rural areas. In each of the eight strata that make up the governorates (administrative units) an exhaustive list is available of the districts in each stratum and the number of households in each.

Before each survey, districts in areas regarded as subject to change (outskirts of towns, waste land, building site areas, etc.) are updated.

(b) The sample:

The survey is based on a two-stage stratified systematic sample design. The global sample rate is 1/60, representing 25,000 households. The primary sampling units are the census districts; the ultimate sampling units are the households. Up to 1988, the sample was renewed by clusters for each interviewing period (four periods a year).

In 1989, the sample size of the "Population-Employment Survey" was increased fourfold and covers 100,000 households.

(c) Rotation:

Before 1989, the total sample was surveyed at the rate of 6,500 households per quarter and the same sample was surveyed the following year, so that the sample for the first quarter of the year was the same as that of the following year. Each sample unit was questioned once a year.

This rotation plan does not apply in the 1989 survey.

10.Field work:

(a) Data collection:

Data is collected at interviews conducted by a permanent team of interviewers from the National Institute of Statistics in January, April, July and October every year.

(b) Substitution of ultimate sampling units:

No substitution of ultimate sampling units is made. The rate of extrapolation is merely corrected as a result.

11.Quality controls:

All questionnaires are subjected to systematic scrutiny at the time of data collection. When the data are processed a probability control is made of the number of economically active persons per household, by comparing the replies to the household questionnaire with the questionnaire on the economically active population.

12.Weighting the sample:

The results of the 1986 survey were enlarged to the total population with the aid of estimates of the 1984 population by stratum, district and cluster.

13.Sampling errors:

Not calculated.

14.Adjustments:

(a) Population not covered:

No adjustment is made.

(b) Under/overcoverage:

No adjustment is made.

(c) Non-response:

The global rate of non-response is approximately 4.7 per cent. No adjustment is made.

15.Seasonal adjustment:

No adjustment is made for seasonal variations.

16.Non-sampling errors:

There is no information available on non-sampling errors.

17.History of the survey:

The survey was annual from 1976 to 1978. Thereafter it was conducted in 1980, 1983, 1986, 1987 and 1989.

In 1989 the sample frame was updated and the sample was multiplied by four to turn the survey into a population/employment survey. The quarterly employment survey has been temporarily suspended.

18.Documentation:

Direction des statistiques démographiques et sociales: "Recueil des résultats de huit passages" (Collected results of eight interviewing periods) (Tunis, 1989).

idem: "Note sur l'emploi en Tunisie d'après les quatre premiers passages" (Note on Employment in Tunisia according to the first four interviewing periods) (Tunis, 1986 and 1987).

The survey results are also available in the form of tables, diskettes, magnetic tapes, etc. and unpublished results can be made available upon request.