Model assisted small area estimation in a municipal Labour Force Survey

In many countries there is a growing demand for current and reliable data on small area. This is certainly true for Italy where the information need concerns most sample surveys carried out by the National Statistical Institute (ISTAT). The Labour Force Survey (LF), for example, which is a quarterly survey, has been designed to warrant accuracy at regional level for the estimates of each wave and at province level for yearly estimates. To cope with this problem, the Municipality of Florence has designed a LF survey, parallel to that of ISTAT, which can produce several reliable estimates at least on yearly base. However the small area problems are not completely overcome as, for costs reasons, the sample has not been designed to produce reliable estimates for interesting domains of study such as districts or other sub-area of the municipality. In this note we propose a model base method for calculating some important estimates in the five districts of the town. Our main objective is to estimate the district total of employed and unemployed people for both each quarterly wave and the entire year. For this last period, direct estimates based on calibration are sufficiently stable and may represent a term of comparison for evaluating the efficacy of the proposed method.