VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs said it will work with the General Statistics Office (GSO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) to find a more suitable method to measure the unemployment rate in Vietnam.

Illustrative image. – File photo

Deputy Minister Pham Minh Huan said the biggest flaw in the current measure to calculate the number of jobless people of Vietnam is the process of taking sample, which should be more representative to come up with an exact result.

“Developed countries in the world have unemployment registration systems which can reach out to every people to yield an exact result. Meanwhile, the process of measuring unemployment rate in Vietnam is based completely on the sampling result of the GSO and therefore, can hardly produce an exact result,” he said.

Huan gave the remarks after strong objections in the local media to a recent labor report that puts the country’s unemployment rate at a mere 1.84% in the second quarter this year.

Huan, however, noted that if applying the latest method of ILO, which was presented at the 19th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) last year, Vietnam’s unemployment rate can be shocking as it would rise to a double-digit rate instead of only 1.84%.

Therefore, the labor ministry will approach the latest methods in the world step by step, the deputy minister said.

First of all, the ministry needs to find the most suitable definition for unemployment in the current economic situation of Vietnam.

Then, it will coordinate with the GSO to give the number of unemployed people every quarter, instead of announcing the result all by itself as currently.

Vietnam has been applying the statistics method and definition of unemployment from the Resolution of the 13th ICLS in 1982 as many other countries in the world have done.

Nevertheless, the definition has appeared to be unsuitable for a developing country like Vietnam whose economy lacks sustainable jobs. The method fails the measure the rate of underemployed people.

The new Resolution of the 19th ICLS was built to fix those problems.

It defines that an employed person is over 15 years old and can take part in a production process to create products or provide services and is paid or obtain profits in a short time of around one week.

The new definition of ILO will give way to a considerable change in the unemployment rate of Vietnam and put many more laborers in the unemployment catergory, including those in the agriculture sector who have subsistence farming and fishing, laborers who want to work overtime, those volunteer laborers, and unpaid interns.

According to ILO, Vietnam may need a period of time to pilot the new method and in the meantime, should keep its current method so that the public will have time to keep up with changes in calculating the unemployment rate.

SGT/VNN