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January 30, 2023LABOUR FORCE SURVEY - SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT REVISIONS Statistics Canada has made their annual revisions to past Labour Force Survey's with changes made for transition to National Occupational Classification 2021 with full revisions back to 1987 for occupation data, methodological enhancements to data processing and imputation back to 2006, and seasonal adjustment factors back to 2002. Population data is unrevised.
Nova Scotia's revised seasonally adjusted labour force survey results for December 2022:
- Labour force was 524,600 (revised upward by 6,500)
- Employment was 492,200 (revised upward 9,000)
- The unemployment rate was 6.2% (revised down from 6.7%)
- The participation rate was 61.7% (revised up from 61.0%)
- The employment rate was 57.9% (revised up from 56.8%)
The revisions have led to generally higher average employment and labour force levels for Nova Scotia, and other provinces after 2006. On average over 2020-2022 the revised employment level is 1.0% higher and the labour force is 1.11% higher. Full-time employment levels over 2020-2022 is 1.27% higher while part-time employment was 0.19% lower. Pre-pandemic employment in February 2020 was revised up to 468,800 and Nova Scotia recovered to this level by February 2021, unrevised data did not surpass until September 2021. In both revised and unrevised data, Nova Scotia highest employment and labour force level are in December 2022.
Changes in monthly employment and labour force estimates result in changes to the estimates of the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate. These adjustments are small, typically reducing volatility reported in the unemployment rate. The previous historical low unemployment rate of 5.9% in July 2022 was revised upward to 6.6%. The revised historical low unemployment rate occurred in November 2022 at 5.7%.
Based on the revised data, the employment rate and participation rates have been higher in the province since 2006. Since February 2020, the revised data show that the participation rate is 1.2 percentage points lower, an improvement compared to the -1.6 in the unrevised data, and the employment rate is 0.2 percentage points higher, an improvement from the - 0.7 in the unrevised data.
Labour Force Survey results for January 2023 will be released on Friday, February 10th. DailyStats analysis will include updated data.
Source: Statistics Canada. Table 14-10-0287-01 Labour force characteristics, monthly, seasonally adjusted and trend-cycle, last 5 months
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