In 2017 the Inter-American Development Bank and the Guyana Bureau of Statistics requested the technical assistance of Sistemas Integrales to design and execute a continuous quarterly labor force survey. 

Named the “Guyana Labor Force Survey” (GLFS), it currently generates regular data on the country’s most important labor market dimensions, to support the design, monitoring and evaluation of labor policy. Quarterly measures include: employment, unemployment, underemployment, informality, population not in the labor force, work and non-work income, plus multiple demographic characteristics. Additionally, the GLFS collects indirect information on emigrants, provided by the surveyed households. 

Sistemas Integrales was responsible for:

• Overall survey design, including sampling strategy, fieldwork organization, data management and quality control
• Programming the electronic questionnaire and conducting the training of field workers
• Developing Guyana’s capacity for a newly-established GLFS unit that would manage future GLFS rounds, which featured training by Sistemas Integrales in all stages of the survey cycle.

Some technical and organizational features of the GLFS:

• The sample design includes a rotating panel of households
• An innovative “Comprehensive Fieldwork Quality Control” system that incorporates randomized audio recording
• Sistemas Integrales steered the first two quarterly rounds in 2017, and the GLFS unit has continued independently in subsequent rounds.

The GLFS anonymized datasets for the third and the fourth quarters of 2017 can be downloaded from the IDB website at:

https://publications.iadb.org/en/guyana-labor-force-survey-third-quarter-2017

https://publications.iadb.org/en/guyana-labor-force-survey-fourth-quarter-2017