Employment and earnings by industry for 1988 to 1990

Question

I am helping a graduate student who is looking for detailed employment and earnings  data by 4-digit NAICS for 1988 to 1990. More specifically, she is looking for a detailed NAICS breakdown for the following codes: 3111-3399 (86 manufacturing industries).

This data is available from 1991 onward through the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH). Unfortunately, I cannot find the equivalent for the 1988 to 1990 period. As far as I can tell from the variables, the Labour Force Survey only provides 43 individual NAICS codes, so it is not nearly as detailed as the SEPH.

Is the data available anywhere?

Answer



1) Have you checked CANSIM Table 301-0001? It’s SIC though, so your student would need to use a concordance table…

2) As a follow-up to this question, my contact in the author division explained that NAICS data is not available prior to 1991:

"Data from the Survey of employment payrolls and hours (SEPH) from 1983 to 2000 was based on the Sic-80 industrial classification system. Data at the 4 digit level was not available at the time. Note that the program has gone many changes through time. Data was converted from Sic 80 To Naics 1997, then from Naics 1997 to Naics 2002 and again from Naics 2002 to Naics 2007. In the late 90's the program was in a redesign phase making the task of revising back difficult. When we converted to Naics 1997 we revised data only from 1991."

She also forwarded me 2 concordance tables that you can use. I will send these two you off-list.

Follow-up Question



The student is currently trying to use data from CANSIM table 301-0001 as suggested by Gail. I wonder however what happened to the SEPH data from 1983 to 2000. Would it be available somewhere? There is no mention of it on the SEPH description page or on the “Other Reference Periods” page. I understand that the data was available under SIC 80 at the time but at what level? 3 digit? The SIC 80 classification for manufacturing industries is relatively detailed even at the 3 digit level so it might be useful for my student.

Follow-up Answer


SEPH data prior to 2001 should be available in the products and services mentioned at the bottom of this page :

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75f0010x/4060181-eng.htm (Labour Market and Income Data Guide, March 2002)

In addition, if you do a CANSIM advanced search for "SEPH", and limit the results to only the terminated tables, you will get results for SEPH data from 1983 to 2000. Many of those tables offer a SIC 80 breakdown of 283 items, which seems to be 3-digit.

My contact in the division did caution that this data has not been revised and may not be comparable to the revised data (which covers series for 1991 to present). You should probably mention this to your student. The following paper discusses the impact of the SEPH redesign, including the NAICS conversion and the impact it has on historical data.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/imdb-bmdi/document/2612_D2_T9_V1-eng.pdf