A Practitioner’s Guide to Handling Irregularities Resulting from the 2014 Revisions to the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey

Abstract

We document the implications of the 2014 revisions to the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey and offer guidance on how to handle the irregularities in population and unemployment statistics that resulted from two particular revisions. First, new population projections were adopted to assign survey weights. Second, a narrower definition of unemployment was adopted. We propose methods to adjust the survey weights for the pre-2014 period in order to discern changes in population statistics by age groups and regions without interruption over time and to calculate the unemployment rates according to both broader and narrower definitions since 2004.