Trust but Verify: Benchmarking Gallup World Poll Employment Data Against the EU-Labour Force Survey

Ioannis Laliotis and Christos A. Makridis

No 12848, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The Gallup World Poll (GWP) links internationally comparable measures of well-being and attitudes to a short labour-market module. We benchmark its employment and hours variables against EU Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) microdata in available European country-years from 2009 to 2023. Under a broad GWP definition that includes both part-time categories, the average country-level GWP-EU LFS employment-rate gap is approximately -1.0 percentage point. The pooled Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition yields a total gap of -0.85 points: observable composition accounts for -0.97 points and the unexplained component is 0.12 points, with a standard error of 1.99 points. This aggregate result masks country and demographic heterogeneity. A narrow definition that excludes part-time work understates employment by roughly 10-20 points. For hours, the GWP mean is 40.18 hours per week, compared with 37.41 in the EU LFS. Demographic reweighting reduces the aggregate difference from 2.77 to 1.99 hours, while group-specific reweighting raises each country-group difference by 0.11 to 0.58 hour. Hours reports generally require more recall and aggregation than binary employment status. The GWP limits this burden by anchoring employment to the preceding seven days and recording total weekly hours in five intervals. The resulting variable provides a common interval-based measure of work intensity; exact mean levels depend on the values assigned to those intervals.

Keywords: survey validation; Gallup World Poll; EU Labour Force Survey; employment; hours worked (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C83 I31 J21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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