Households and the labour market for local areas
AbstractThe latest annual Statistical Bulletin on 'Work and worklessness among households' was published by the Office
for National Statistics on 26 August 2009. It gives information about working-age households, and about the adults and
children living in them, by household economic activity status. It includes estimates of workless working-age
households, and the adults and children living in them, by household type, region, and ethnicity. This article, using the
Annual Population Survey, considers more detailed geographical breakdowns of the same information. Detailed tables
reporting the sub-regional data can be found in an online version of this article which is available at: www.statistics.
gov.uk/articles/nojournal/householdslabourmarket-local-areas.pdf.
Quality measures
of household
labour market
indicators
AbstractThis article considers the reliability of
the two main survey sources for key
household labour market indicators, using
standard errors to inform users on the
accuracy of regular household analysis.
It shows the level of detail that provides
reliable analysis for different geographies.
It will also consider when to use the
Annual Population Survey (APS) instead
of the Labour Force Survey (LFS, see ONS
2009a).
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo