We can see how closely the census and IRD definitions of a workforce align with each other by checking how much they overlap during the month of the census. The chart below shows the proportion of those classified by either definition who are classified by each definition. The donut charts show a breakdown of why people were not included in a particular definition.
The exact proportion differ between industries, but the main reason for not being included in a definition is that no record exists either in the census or IRD records. There may be no IRD record because a worker happened to not make any income in the month of the census but was working in the sector in earlier months. Those people who received income in March 2013 but did not appear in the census are more difficult to explain. They will be some combination of people who happened to go overseas during the census, those who did not fill out the census, and those whose census records have not been matched to their IRD records.
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.
