The labour register in Italy: the new heart of the system of labour statistics

The ongoing construction of a Labour register is greatly enhancing the labour statistics either due to the possibility of producing output directly or by constituting a coordination framework able to provide a much greater alignment and coherence to the entire system for labour statistics, in the spirit of the ESS Vision 2020. Three pillars ensure this result. First, a set of clearly defined statistical units, the main one being: the employer, the worker and the core of the system, that is the work relationship. The data representations based on each unit feed respectively the business statistics (such as SBS), the social statistics (such as the census and LFS) and more specific labour market statistics. In this regard, the system allows producing an output of fluxes indicators (such as job creation and destruction) consistent with more usual stock statistics (number of jobs). Second, a set of classifications and coding rules able to map precisely the juridical/fiscal/contributive reality of the labour market into a statistical representation according to the international classifications, including the incoming versions of ILO ICSE. Third, a set of measures on labour input which in most cases are able to fulfill directly the statistical standards or can be used as intermediate input or auxiliary variables. This set of measures span from formal duration of the contract, to the number of hours actually worked, passing through measures of effective activity, remunerated activity and hours paid. The paper, beyond describing these measures and their relationships, illustrates their capacity of illuminating old and new labour market issues such as the fragmentation of the work activity.