Q.Explain the difference between the Usual Status, Current Weekly Status and Current Daily Status approaches used to measure unemployment in India.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →India's employment/unemployment surveys — historically the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), and now largely the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted by the National Statistical Office — use three different reference-period approaches to estimate unemployment, and each captures a different slice of reality:
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Usual Status (US) — uses the preceding 365 days as the reference period. A person is classified as employed if they were engaged in some economic activity for a majority of the days in that year. Because it looks at the whole year, this approach smooths over short spells of unemployment (such as a few idle weeks between farm seasons) and generally produces the LOWEST unemployment estimate of the three.
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Current Weekly Status (CWS) — uses the preceding 7 days as the reference period. A person is classified as employed if they worked for at least one hour on at least one day of that week. This is more sensitive than the Usual Status approach, since a person who was without any work for most of the year but happened to get a single day's work in the reference week would be counted differently under the two methods.
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Current Daily Status (CDS) — records each of the preceding seven days separately for every person, classifying each individual day as employed, unemployed, or outside the labour force based on the hours worked that specific day. This is the most detailed and comprehensive approach, and because it can capture partial employment within a single week (for example, a person who worked half-days on some days), it usually produces the HIGHEST unemployment estimate of the three. …
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