Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
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You can see there how the numbers bounce up and down. Some of this is due to labour market volatility and some of it is error.
The monthly employment numbers in Halifax are a small random sampling based on a survey. I don't think there is a way to know exactly how many people were working in the city during the past month (taxes would give you better data but I don't think businesses report monthly).
The sampling error is amplified when you focus just on the change in the employment total the year-over-year monthly change. Imagine if there were a good probability of being just 1% off in the estimate of the number of employed people in the city; you might go 1% over one month and 1% under during the same month the next year. This is an apparent large decrease in the number of jobs (about 4,000 less in the Halifax case) that is just sampling error.
You'd do better by doing something like plotting these monthly samples on a chart to try to find trends over a few years. Or by relying on some other source of data. Not as nice as getting an up-to-the-month account of the labour force but probably much more reliable.
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