Monitoring and Evaluating the Performance of the Labour Market in Scotland

Working Paper 18 from the Centre for Public Policy for Regions by John Sutherland

Abstract

Given the Scottish Government’s decision to benchmark the performance of the labour market as one of the seven targets identified in its “Economic Strategy”, this paper examines how the performance of the labour market might best be monitored and evaluated. It recommends that, with some caution with regard to the need for frequent disaggregation. four indicators are used:

• the activity (or participation) rate;
• the employment rate;
• the unemployment rate; and
• the inactivity rate.

The paper proceeds to apply these four indicators to examine the performance of the labour market in Scotland over two periods: 1995-2005 and 2005 (third quarter) - 2007 (fourth quarter). For the latter period the performance of the labour market in Scotland is compared with that of the labour markets in England, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Finally, the paper employs two of these labour market performance indicators (the activity rate and the unemployment rate) to examine the Scottish Government’s “cohesion” aspiration.

PDF 35pp

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