A blend of traditional and alternative data supports labour market evaluation!
Karma Global is a HR & Compliance dominated Consulting firm having its headquarters in Mumbai India and foreign offices in Canada, the US, the UK, UAE and South East India. It offers solutions with AI tech products which have every required feature and module built into the various offerings. A blend of traditional and alternative data supports labour market evaluation!
What is Data Analysis?
Data analysis is the process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modelling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, encompassing diverse techniques under a variety of names, and is used in different business, science, and social science domains. In today’s business world, data analysis plays a role in making decisions more scientific and helping businesses operate more effectively.
What is Data Mining?
Data mining is a particular data analysis technique that focuses on statistical modelling and knowledge discovery for predictive rather than purely descriptive purposes, while business intelligence covers data analysis that relies heavily on aggregation, focusing mainly on business information.
What is Data Integration?
Data integration is a precursor to data analysis, and data analysis is closely linked to data visualization and data dissemination.
What are traditional indicators and how does it help?
India has a range of indicators which throw significant light on India’s employment scenario. Traditional indicators like participation rate, unemployment rate and worker-population ratio are considered for this purpose.
What is alternative data and how does it help?
Any insightful information about employment trends that one needs for research and analysis which doesn’t come from traditional sources is considered alternative data.
What is the ideal situation?
India has a range of indicators which throw significant light on India’s employment scenario. In a country with abundant labour, a predominantly young working population and a large informal sector, there is high importance of both traditional and alternative data for getting to know employment demands and labour-consumer supply.
In order to understand employment in India, CEIC offers a great mix of traditional and alternative indicators.
CEIC India offers an extensive range of relevant Alternative and Traditional data to Analysts for robust interpretation and prediction of the various elements of the labour market. It has a combination of exclusive curated alternative data, along with traditional data, released near real-time to improve the predictive capability of various analytical models.
The timely updates and continuous focus on new data expansion, from various official and recognised sources, endows analysts with capabilities to run precision predictive models for both near and long term. It also, includes an extensive coverage of subnational or State level data and in some cases city level data across a range of variables.
Let us see how the formal or traditional data works:
Under formal employment markets, job postings data can be used to fill in the gaps, created by the traditional indicators being too few and not timely enough.
The Naukri Job Speak index and the Foundit Insights Tracker (formerly the Monster Employment Index) are both monthly indicators and can serve as a predictor of the job market dynamic in India because of their timeliness.
The Naukri JobSpeak indicator has virtually no lag, while the Foundit Insights Tracker is published two weeks after the reference month. Both indicators are based on job listings on the respective employment websites, focused on white-collar hiring in India.
Traditional indicators like the participation rate point to an improvement since June 2022, reaching its highest in Q1 2023, at 38.1%, while the job postings data signal a moderating job market since the beginning of 2023. However, despite the volatility displayed by the Naukri JobSpeak Index, averaging around 2,900 between June 2022 and May 2023, it still remains above the pre-pandemic levels, signalling a continued moderation of the labour market.
The Foundit Insights Tracker, on the other side, has been more pessimistic, plunging from 292 in February 2023, to 265 in May 2023, unable to match up to the pre-pandemic trends.
In addition to these, the weekly data from Revelio labs also reaffirms that the job market in India reached a turning point in February 2023, as active job postings dropped to 191,270 units, the lowest since July 2022.
However, India’s job market has a much bigger prevalence of informal jobs, which is difficult to measure. In some ways, data from Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) helps understand the direction the unskilled jobs market may be moving.
Both work demand and employment generated under MGNREGS have generally decreased since June 2022, although they have yet to reach pre-pandemic levels in absolute terms. Work demand has been experiencing annual declines since June 2021, with a 9.3% year-on-year drop in April 2023.
On the other hand, generated employment in the same month experienced a more significant decline of 27.3% year-on-year. Additionally, while the average national MGNREGS wage has steadily increased, the real growth (adjusted for inflation) has significantly dropped since November 2021, with the average yearly wage declining by 1.5% year-on-year in FY2022 and 1.8% year-on-year in FY2023.
Role of CEIC to supplement the traditional and formal job data:
CEIC is a macroeconomic, industry and financial data platform that curates the highest quality and timeliest economic data from traditional and high-frequency alternative sources enabling economists and investment professionals to understand the development and near real-time performance of the markets they cover.
Data is available for over 200 countries and territories but with a specific focus on emerging markets through deep country-specific databases. High-frequency and alternative datasets supplement traditional data sources to provide early insight into what is happening now to facilitate the best possible investment and strategic decision-making for clients.
Proprietary blog of Karma Global
This blog has been collated and compiled by the internal staff of Karma Global with the knowledge and expertise that they possess, besides adaptation, illustration, derivation, transformation, and collection from various sources, for its monthly newsletter Issue 14 of August 2023 and in case of specific or general information or compliance updates for that matter, kindly reach out to the Marketing Team – Kush@karmamgmt.com / yashika@karmamgmt.com