Title: Estimation of the Belgian Economically Active Population as of 30 June for the Years 1970-1986 (Estimation de la Population active belge au 30 juin des Années 1970-1986).
Source: Ministry of Employment and Labour (MET), Employment Administration, Directorate for the Study of Labour Problems (Ministère de l'Emploi et du Travail (MET), Administration de l'Emploi, Direction de l'Etude des Problèmes du Travail).
Employment:
This series is not published in the Bulletin.
The Directorate for the Study of Labour Problems, Employment Administration, Ministry of Employment and Labour, is responsible for the statistical processing and publication of the data. These are obtained by processing the statistics from the following social security bodies: in the case of paid employment, from the National Social Security Office (Office national de Sécurité sociale - ONSS), the National Pension Fund for Mineworkers (Fonds national de Retraite des Ouvriers mineurs - FNROM) and the Social Security Office for the Merchant Navy (Office de Sécurité sociale de la Marine marchande - OSSMM), and, in the case of self-employment, from the Institute of Social Insurance for Independent workers (Institut national d'Assurance sociale pour Travailleurs indépendents - INASTI), supplemented by the statistics of the TVA (value added tax) Administration and the agricultural statistics of the National Statistical Institute (INS). These raw data are adjusted, in particular, by the General Censuses and the labour force surveys.
Geographical: Whole country.
Industrial: All major industrial groups; the series by type of economic activity is based on the General Industrial Classification of Economic Activities within the European Communities (NACE). Conversion to the International Standard Industrial Classification of all Economic Activities (ISIC) is at the two-digit level.
(a) In the case of employees, the determining factor is the sector to which their employers belong. All employers are attached to a specific category determined by their principal economic activity while each establishment has its own economic activity and is classified on the basis of this criterion. The distribution of employees is based on the classification of the employer or of the establishment employing them.
(b) The self-employed are classified by the TVA according to sector because of their registration with the TVA Administration. Managers are classified in accordance with company distribution, whereas the liberal professions are classified by INASTI.
(c) The distribution of helpers is based on the latest General Census.
Occupational: The series covers all occupational groups. However, as no administrative source carries out a distribution by occupation or occupational group, the series merely reproduces the results of the General Censuses.
Establishment: There is no classification by size of establishment in this series. However, these statistics can be obtained for establishments employing staff and reported by ONSS. The concept of establishment implies both moral persons (companies, etc.) and physical persons with the status of employer (including the authorities of the State, provinces and communes, as well as institutions in the public service which employ workers with comprehensive or partial social security coverage).
Persons covered:
(a) All workers under the jurisdiction of ONSS by virtue of the Act of 27 June 1969 and present at work (or considered to be such) on the last day of the quarter under consideration, to which are added all workers under the respective jurisdictions of FNROM and OSSMM, thereby constituting statistics for all workers covered by social security.
(b) All self-employed persons and helpers as estimated by MET.
(c) Those categories of employees who are not included from the statistics of social security bodies (staff of the SNCB, persons with the status of unemployed who are given work) who are estimated from other sources.
The data refer to the situation at 30 June of each year, since 1970. They are published according to the availability of the basic data, generally during the third quarter of the following year.
Employment: The internal employment series comprises residents and non-residents working in resident productive units. This includes employees hired for contract work or as apprentices and those in a statutory situation, employed in a resident productive unit; self-employed persons and helpers; workers occupied in rehabilitation training schemes; career members of the armed forces, contractual members and conscripts; foreign border workers, i.e. persons who cross the border daily to work in the country; foreign seasonal workers, i.e. persons who come to perform an activity, in the country, for a period of less than a year in sectors where an additional workforce is periodically required; persons in domestic service, homeworkers and replacements; members of the national armed forces located outside the geographical territory of the country; national diplomatic personnel stationed abroad; and local representatives of national public administrations working outside the country.
The following are excluded from this series: national border workers and seasonal workers, i.e. workers who perform an activity in another country; local agents of foreign public administrations established inside the geographical territory of the country; and the staff of institutions of the European Communities and of international military organisations located inside the geographical territory of the country.
In the case of employees the MET series is mainly based on the social security institutions. These institutions also cover workers with social security coverage who are present at work on the last day of the quarter. They include workers with social security coverage whose work contracts have been suspended but not terminated as a result of illness, accident, pre- and post-maternity leave, or military service, and those who are not at work on the day in question for reasons of leave, strike, part-time or accidental unemployment or absence, whether justified or unjustified.
Workers who are employed for a short time, i.e. for not more than two hours a day as a rule, are excluded from this statistical source and are therefore not covered by the MET series. This exclusion, however, does not concern homeworkers, entertainment artists, teaching personnel, ministers of religion and, provided that they do not have another occupation, service workers in factories or churches and cleaners. Certain other categories of workers excluded from the social security system are estimated by other means.
In the case of a succession of jobs during the same quarter, workers are entered as such in the returns of the employers who were employing them on the last day of the quarter. Each part-time worker counts as one person.
The MET estimates include the self-employed, employers or not, as well as helpers. These self-employed persons include the following:
(a) Farmers and gardeners who are counted annually by INS (Agricultural and Horticultural Census);
(b) Self-employed persons who, because they have a commercial activity, are registered with the TVA and thus counted in the statistics of the TVA Administration under the Ministry of Finance. Some adjustment are made to maintain persons in their principal activity only and to eliminate subsidiary occupations;
(c) Persons exercising a liberal profession who are estimated on the basis of the social insurance coverage of the self-employed.
Company managers who are not registered with the TVA as such are estimated on the basis of INASTI records and the figures for the companies registered with the TVA. Adjustments for these categories are made on the basis of the latest census figures available.
Helpers, however, are not subject to the same social security coverage rules. In fact, only a few residual categories of helpers come within the jurisdiction of social security; the others, being considered as dependent on the self-employed persons they assist, are not included in any administrative statistics. Consequently, estimates are arrived at in relation to the number of self-employed persons and adjustments are made based on the latest census.
Hours of work: Not applicable.
Wages: Not applicable.
30 June each year.
(a) Employees with full or partial social security coverage are counted on the basis of regular or regionalised statistical sheets for the second quarter of the year under consideration, which are returned to ONSS before 15 February the following year. The survey is comprehensive, except for a limited number of small enterprises whose returns do not reach ONSS before the deadline for the close of processing operations.
The ONSS data are supplemented by the regionalised data for mine workers and related persons who come under the jurisdiction of FNROM, and non-regionalised data on seamen in the merchant marine who fall within the jurisdiction of OSSMM.
Some categories of employees who are not covered by social security are estimated on the basis of other sources. These are mainly persons in domestic service; persons permanently employed by the SNCB; unemployed persons who have been set to work; unemployed persons on vocational training; persons who, because of extraterritorial status or by agreement, are considered as having a job in a Belgian production unit; and members of the armed forces. Certain corrections are made in order to reduce the number of persons counted several times by social security. Double counting occurs when various jobs are held simultaneously with different employers, or, as in public services and in education, when various functions are performed for the same employer. Some of these adjustments made are based on the General Censuses.
(b) Self-employed persons are estimated on the basis of administrative sources. These do not take into account the number of hours worked, but only consider the registration of the self-employed with the TVA or, in the case of the liberal professions, affiliation to INASTI. Corrections are subsequently made in the basic data to deal with two major problems.
On the one hand, a large number of self-employed persons manage a commercial company. Hence, it is the company that is given a registration number by the TVA and not the self-employed person or persons running it. Consequently they are not reflected in the statistics. An estimate of the number of managers is therefore made on the basis of INASTI, of the General Census and of the number of commercial companies registered with the TVA in order to add them to the number of self-employed registered as such.
On the other hand, a certain number of self-employed persons undertake other independent activities which are complementary to their paid employment, in respect of which they were classified by ONSS. Such persons are none the less included in the statistics of the TVA, each person counting as a unit. An estimation of this category is then made in order to reduce the number of self-employed accordingly and avoid double counting.
With regard to helpers, the MET statistics are not based directly on administrative sources (see under Definitions above). It is therefore unnecessary to make adjustments of the kind used for other categories.
The series was first revised after the 1970 General Census. A further revision will be undertaken for the year 1987 based on the 1981 census returns.
Ministère de l'Emploi et du Travail, Administration de l'Emploi, Direction de l'Etude des Problèmes du Travail: "Estimation de la population active belge au 30 juin..., nouvelle série NACE" for the years 1970 to 1986 (annual) (Brussels).
The date of the last issue was 1987; the latest data available were for 1986.