Labour Force

Abstract

The statistics in this section cover a wide range of topics and come from a variety of sources. The occupation data were almost entirely derived by Professor Bairoch and his colleagues from national censuses of population. The problems of accuracy referred to in the last section appear here also, therefore. But a more significant difficulty is the very considerable variations which have occurred in classification, both between countries and over time. When Jacques Bertillon came to put together his volume of nineteenth century European population censuses for the International Institute of Statistics in 1899, he expressed the view that “the nomenclatures adopted by the different countries are so different that international comparisons would have been either very difficult of fallacious”.¹ Professor Bairoch’s group, having made every possible effort to achieve international and intertemporal comparability, in effect echo Bertillon, when they write that “because of the frequent changes in criteria and methods used in census taking…it is practically impossible to come up with statistics that are perfectly comparable in time and space”.²