I. Introduction

a. Background

The Stability and growth of a country's economy hinges on its ability to produce goods and services for both domestic and international use. Labor represents an important factor of production, hence, the improvement of the quality of the labor force, and efforts to make it more productive and responsive to growth are necessary for the development of the economy. A clear knowledge and understanding of the size, composition, and other characteristics of the segment of the population is a big step in this direction. A continuing supply of the data on labor force is indispensable to national and local development planning.

The Labor Force Survey (LFS) is a vehicle to gather such data on the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the population with nationwide coverage and conducted on a quarterly and monthly mode by interviewing households. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) implements the LFS.

b. Objectives

The LFS aims to provide a quantitative framework for the preparation of plans, and formulation of policies affecting the labor market.

Specifically, the survey is designed to provide statistics on levels and trends of employment, enemployment, and underemployment for the country, as a whole and for each of the administrative regions.

c. Scope and Coverage

With regions as domain, survey operations for November 2022 LFS ran for 18 days from 08 to 28 November 2022 and covered 10,965 eligible sample households.

Overseas Filipino Workers are not considered part of the labor force in the Philippines. Hence, in the LFS, data on economic characteristics of household members who are overseas workers are not collected. In the LFS report, they are excluded in the estimation of the size of working population, i.e., population aged 15 years and older, and in the estimation of the labor force.