As an alternative to the census we can determine someone’s sector of employment from IRD records. This has the advantage of being trackable over time and providing detailed information about income. IRD records do not have any information about a person’s occupation, however. This limits us to defining a workforce based on their industry only. We can use income thresholds to select the less casual elements of a workforce. For example, we may include only those who earn more than $2500 per month in a sector.
Methodology
Access to the data used in this study was provided by Stats NZ under conditions designed to give effect to the security and confidentiality provisions of the Data and Statistics Act 2022. The results presented in this study are the work of the author, not Stats NZ or individual data suppliers.
These results are not official statistics. They have been created for research purposes from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) which is carefully managed by Stats NZ. For more information about the IDI please visit https://www.stats.govt.nz/integrated-data/.
The results are based in part on tax data supplied by Inland Revenue to Stats NZ under the Tax Administration Act 1994 for statistical purposes. Any discussion of data limitations or weaknesses is in the context of using the IDI for statistical purposes, and is not related to the data's ability to support Inland Revenue's core operational requirements.
