Page 567 - The Principle of Economics

length of the average workweek, and the duration of unemployment. These data come from a regular survey of about 60,000 households, called the Current Popu- lation Survey.
Based on the answers to survey questions, the BLS places each adult (aged six- teen and older) in each surveyed household into one of three categories:
N Employed
N Unemployed
N Not in the labor force
A person is considered employed if he or she spent most of the previous week working at a paid job. A person is unemployed if he or she is on temporary layoff, is looking for a job, or is waiting for the start date of a new job. A person who fits neither of the first two categories, such as a full-time student, homemaker, or re- tiree, is not in the labor force. Figure 26-1 shows this breakdown for 1998.
Once the BLS has placed all the individuals covered by the survey in a cate- gory, it computes various statistics to summarize the state of the labor market. The BLS defines the labor force as the sum of the employed and the unemployed:
Labor force 􏰀 Number employed 􏰁 number of unemployed
labor force
the total number of workers, including both the employed and the unemployed
CHAPTER 26 UNEMPLOYMENT AND ITS NATURAL RATE 581
Employed (131.5 million)
Unemployed (6.2 million)
Adult population (205.2 million)
Labor force (137.7 million)
Figure 26-1
THE BREAKDOWN OF THE POPULATION IN 1998. The Bureau of Labor Statistics divides the adult population into three categories: employed, unemployed, and not in the labor force.
SOURCE: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Not in labor force (67.5 million)