Labour Input in National Accounts: Some Issues and Implications

With a view to bring about exhaustive concordance between the number of workers and the labour input in the productive process - the latter to be used for estimating value added from many sectors in the unorganized non-agriculture segment in National Accounts -almost all the base year revisions have sought to introduce one or other methodological modifications. This paper attempts to establish a relationship between the labour input and the workforce obtained from Usual Principal Subsidiary Status (UPSS) and Enterprise surveys and its implication thereon. It is concluded that though the definitional dis-similarities between the two concepts preclude the use of headcount approach to arrive at labour input for National Account purposes but as there is no other alternate source, present methodology is adopted. It is proposed that, the concept of employment itself should be re-examined and the Employment-Unemployment survey schedule may be appropriately modified.