A Simulation Study of Weighting Methods to Improve Labour-Force Estimates of Immigrants in Ireland

As immigration has become a global phenomenon in recent years, a number of European countries, including Ireland, have experienced an influx of immigrants, causing a shift in their national demographics. Therefore, it is important that the EU-LFS yield reliable labour-force estimates not only for the whole population, but also for the immigrant population.

This article uses simulation techniques to compare the effectiveness of four different weighting mechanisms in order to improve the precision of the labour-force estimates from the Irish component of the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) called the Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS). The four weighting methodologies for comparison include the original and the current weighting scheme of the QNHS as well as our two proposed alternative weighting schemes. The simulation results show that by modifying the current QNHS weighting mechanism, we can improve the accuracy of the labour-force estimates of the immigrant population in Ireland without affecting the estimates of the whole population and the Irish nationals.

This article highlights potential issues that other countries with new immigrant populations may face when using the EU-LFS for immigration research, and our recommendations may be useful to researchers and national statistical offices in such countries.