Estimated unemployment rate for the third quarter of 2016 was 4.5 percent according to the Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted by Department of Census and Statistics (DCS), DCS Director General Dr. A.J. Satharasinghe said.
LFS was conducted quarterly for 36 consecutive years and it is designed to measure the levels and trends of employment and labour force in Sri Lanka. Labour force statistics for the third quarter of 2016 were released as a new series of statistics after the reweighting process of labour force statistics. LFS was carried out in July, August and September of 2016 based on a sample of 6,440 housing units covering the whole country.
The estimated employed population according to the LFS is around 8 Million for the quarter and of which service sector has the highest employment share of 46.1 percent. Contribution to employed population from the Agriculture sector and Industries sector was marked as 27.1 percent and 26.8 percent respectively. Employed population is considered as those who worked at least one hour during the reference period as paid employees, employers, own account workers or contributing family workers. This survey also revealed that 68 percent of the employed population works more than 40 hours per week.
Estimated economically active population was analysed as 8.4 million in the third quarter of 2016 and of which 63.5 percent are males and 36.5 percent are females.
Economically active population is known as the total working age population (age 15 and above) who are employed or unemployed during the reference period.
According to the LFS, Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) for the third quarter is estimated as 53.8 percent, where 75 percent of which is identified as male contribution and 36 percent is female contribution.
LFPR is derived when labour force population is expressed as a percentage of the working age population in the country and this indicates the measure of economically active population who are in working age currently.
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