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Labour Markets:  text only  cep home page  about the cep  contact us  research   -labour markets: key research areas:   --rise and fall of      unemployment.   --wage inequality.   --social exclusion.   --workless      households.   --southern european      labour markets.   --state of working      britain.   --child labour.   --inequalities in      unemployment.   --staff on this      programme  publications  events & calendar  staff directory  support & services  news & highlights   Workless households Typically work, or the lack of it is measured by counting the number of individuals without a job. However individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. In Britain, the non-employment rate aggregated up from individual data has remained unchanged, subject to cyclical variation, over the past 25 years. However the number of workless households has tripled over the same period. This has important implications for those concerned with the labour market but also those concerned with welfare system design, poverty, inequality, public sector deficit financing and consumption behaviour. This study by Jonathan Wadsworth and Paul Gregg outlines these trends and tries to develop a simple set of indices to measure joblessness at the household level and to identify the likely source of any disparity in the signals stemming from individual and household-based measures of worklessness. Using data from a number of OECD countries, we show that in all the countries we examine, there has been a growing disparity between the individual and household based jobless measures, though the incidence and magnitude of these changes varies widely.

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