LMRA Is Pleased to Note the Interest of the Media on Labour Market Data with the Publication

Unregistered Bahraini employed persons

LMRA Policy Directorate

25 November 2009

It is customary in Bahrain to measure employment by aggregating the number of persons registered at the Pension Fund Commission (PFC) and the General Insurance Organisation (GOSI), one covering the “public sector” and the other the “private sector”.

But, not every employed Bahrainis is registered in these two organizations, either because registration of certain categories of persons is not mandatory by law, or because there are delays and sometimes errors in the registration systems.

For these reasons, the measurement of total Bahraini employment by LMRA includes estimates of non-registered (or uninsured) employed persons. The following table shows the estimate and its composition for 2007 Q4, compared with independent results from the 2007 labour force survey (LFS).

The table shows that according to the labour force survey, there were some 11’490 Bahraini employed persons who declared to be neither registered at PFC or GOSI in November 2007. The corresponding LMRA estimate was 11’581, representing an error rate of less than 1%.

The labour force survey indicates that the unregistered Bahraini employed persons were composed of employees (41%), employers (27%), own-account workers (22%), unpaid family workers (1%) and other categories of workers (9%).

The labour accounting procedure, however, estimates that unregistered Bahraini employment was composed wholly of employers (44%), own-account workers (42%), and unpaid family workers (14%). Further investigation should provide more information on the nature of the compositional differences, helping to further improve the labour accounting procedure of LMRA.