 Greetings, colleagues. We are now ready for the sixth session in our series of workshops on the implementation of the UNTSE Sector Satellite Account Handbook. This is Lester Solomon again. And that's my pleasure to be with you for another of these sessions. The last session, as you may remember, our fifth session in this series, we focused on the data items on institutional units. The institutional components of this third or social economy sector. And that was fairly easy because the core SNA data items are basically the ones that we fundamentally need to put together the satellite account so far as the institutional units are concerned. And you already have those core data items from the core of the SNA. We just had to make two adjustments, as you'll remember. One of them was the reconfiguration of the revenues so that we had a picture of the revenues by source, which is particularly important for this TSE sector because it has different sources of revenue and the characteristics of them differ a little bit from the concepts that lie behind the SNA data. And then the second adjustment that we have proposed in the handbook is to make an estimation of the non-market output of market TSEs, of market third sector entities. And this is required because unlike the market entities which only have market output, most of the market entities, many of these TSE sector institutional units are allocated to the market sector because they do get significant market income, but they also produce output that is not market-based that is financed from other ways or not financed at all. It's carried out by volunteers or it's a product of charitable contributions and the SNA would otherwise miss the product that is achieved as a consequence of this non-market output. And so we talked about how to estimate the non-market output of these market NPIs that are part of the TSE sector. Today we focus on another component of the TSE sector which is made up of the individual activities, fundamentally the workforce of the TSE sector. And here we have two components of that workforce. One are the paid workers. And for that there is data in the SNA at least on one component as you'll hear, but the volunteer data does not really exist in the SNA as we discussed when we talked about the treatment of the volunteers in SNA. And so we have to do a little more complicated story about how to get data on the volunteer workers. And that's what most of this workshop session is going to focus on. Just to give you a perspective on this component, here's a picture of how the core SNA reports on the workforce of the TSE sector and indeed of any sector of the economy. It does have data on the compensation of employees. These are paid employees and the one variable that is captured in the SNA is the compensation, the amount of money that is paid to employees because it is a factor of production. But the number of paid workers either in general or the full-time equivalent or the field that they work in, that's not covered nor are the volunteers, either organization volunteers or direct volunteers. There's nothing in the SNA about their numbers. There's nothing in them about the numbers of full-time equivalent workers they represent or the field. And there's nothing in the SNA really about the value of volunteer work, only partial data on one type of volunteering, direct volunteering, but even there, it's only in case that the work of the volunteers, the direct volunteers happens to produce physical items that the SNA can estimate the value of because it has other physical items that are being produced. So this for our purposes in the satellite account is inadequate. What we want in the satellite account is this next slide shows is of course, yes, the compensation of employees. So we're going to keep that one variable, but we also wanna know some things about the paid workers for which the SNA will have to look at the results of labor force surveys. We wanna know the number of those workers. We wanna know something about their full-time equivalents and we'll talk about what that means shortly. We wanna know about the field in which they work, all of which are items that are covered in labor force surveys. But we also want to get information on the volunteers and we want it both on the organization-based volunteers as well as the direct volunteers. We want the number of those workers, we want a expression of the full-time equivalent which means we need the hours that they work so we can convert the head counts of volunteers into the equivalent full-time workers and we want to compute the value of the volunteer work. And so these are all more elaborate efforts that need to be undertaken to find these additional data items. And we've had to work with the International Labor Organization to come up with an approach to capturing these data. And as you may remember from our discussion of the volunteer units, essentially we have proposed a special insert to the labor force survey to capture data on volunteer workers. And we're going to suggest that if it's not already done in your country that you may contact the people in your statistical agency that has responsibility for the labor force survey and see if they will be willing to add a small module to the total. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's just take it one step at a time. Just so we have a clear understanding of it, what do we mean by full-time equivalent volunteers? Essentially, we'd like to express the volunteer effort in the same kind of terms that are used to convey and express regular workers. Volunteers tend to spend more limited time in their volunteer activity. It's not a full-time occupation for most people who do volunteers. And so if we just add up the head count of volunteers we'll come out with a number that is very misleading because it's counting people who may work three or four hours in a month and assuming that they are full-time workers when in fact they're not. And so full-time equivalence is computed by taking the total number of hours that volunteers perform their volunteer activities and divide it by the average hours in a full-time job in a particular country. So just to put this into concrete terms, if for example, in your country, a full-time job is estimated to be about 2,000 hours in a year and we calculate through various surveys that I'm going to describe that there are 200,000 hours of volunteering that are performed in your country. You would divide the 200,000 hours by 2,000 hours per full-time job to come up with the conclusion that you had 100 full-time employee volunteers, 100 full-time equivalent workers who are volunteers. Obviously the numbers are gonna be much higher than that but that just shows you the basic arithmetic of getting to an FTE figure from a number that represents the added total of all the hours that are generated by volunteers in a particular country. So how do we go about measuring and valuing a volunteer work? And how has this been done so far in the SNA? And I'm going over here some information that we've already discussed in the context of discussing the definition of the volunteer work. Here are the two ways in which volunteer work value is estimated first in the SNA currently and second in the satellite account that we're calling on you all to produce. Essentially, as you remember, SNA essentially treats organization and direct volunteering differently. In the case of organization-based volunteering, the SNA approach is a little bit misleading. It basically says, oh, you have these workers, we will do it the way we do any worker and we will do it on the basis of the cost to the employer. But if you'll remember back to our definition of what a volunteer is, volunteers are not paid at all by their employers. And so to say that you are measuring the value of volunteering by the cost of the employer essentially means you don't put any value on it at all. And while this may make a lot of logical sense, it doesn't make any practical sense because the work of volunteers is producing value to the economy, valuing it at zero essentially ignores that value. In the case of direct volunteering, the SNA approach is a little bit better but not by any means adequate. Only the value of volunteer work that goes into the production of physical structures is captured in the SNA. And essentially they compute what the cost is of producing these physical structures in other settings by regular workers and they assign that value to the value of the volunteer workers. So if they're building homes for poor people, for example, they will have a value that is put on the price of the home that is of that basic size and dimensions and character. And that would be the value assigned to volunteer work. But we know that a lot of volunteer work is really service work. It's lawyers giving pro bono work to organizations. It's accountants helping them with their tax filings. All of this or it's doctors providing volunteer work to help people with their medical issues. So all of this service work which is quite significant or can be quite significant is lost from view under this SNA approach. And so we were able to convince the keepers of the SNA that these are not adequate ways to measure the contributions of volunteering to the society at large and that we needed to build into the satellite account a different approach. And so what we have done essentially in the third sector satellite account handbook is to come up with a different alternative way of measuring the value of volunteer work. So far as organization based volunteering is concerned, we have suggested a replacement cost approach and we've particularly recommended a specialist replacement cost approach. I'll describe in a little more detail what these two different forms of replacement cost are but suffice it to say that the replacement cost for organizations can be more precise because the organization knows what kind of work the worker did. And if it's in the context of an organization it's usually structured a bit more. And therefore we can get down to a pretty precise measure of the occupation group that is represented by the work that's done for the organization. In the case of direct volunteering it's just a little more difficult to come up with a precise measure of the replacement cost and therefore we have sort of loosened the concept and come up with a generalist approach which is a general in the economy. And as you'll see, there are several options that countries can use or how to estimate the value of the direct volunteer work. So what do we mean by a replacement cost? A specialist replacement cost. This next slide gives you a picture of it. We basically find the wages that are paid in the same industry for the same occupation that the volunteer has indicated that they have performed for that organization. And then, and here's where it gets a little more tricky it's adjusted for the skill level that volunteers may bring to these tasks. What this means in practice is that it is assumed that volunteers don't quite always have the same skill level for the jobs that they're performing as with a regular employee in that same occupation. And so we have to discount a bit the wage that would be paid for that same occupation. In other words, we're being a bit conservative in the value that we're assigning. We don't assume that the wages paid to wages that would be paid to the volunteer would be the same as the wages paid to a full-time worker in that occupation because the volunteer may not be at the same skill level as the normal person who is performing that occupation. So there's an adjustment in a sense, a downward adjustment of the wages so that we don't overstate the value of volunteering. And it turns out that the value of volunteering is so large that it can experience a certain downgrading a little bit in order to avoid making it sound even more difficult for people to believe. So that's the specialist replacement cost. It's the same occupational level wage, but it's discounted for the difference in skill level of the volunteer versus the paid worker. The generalist replacement cost, we've identified several different options which countries can choose and which they can report on. So we know what they've done depending on what's available in the economy. Option one is probably the easiest. It's the average wage of all occupations in the economy. What's the average wage of workers in the entire economy? Option number two, it takes account of the fact that many volunteers operate in the personal services industry, which is where so much of the activity of the third sector institutions takes place. And therefore a reasonable proxy for direct volunteering in the service sector would be the personal services industry average wages. And usually the data that exists on the labor force in the country coming out of the labor force surveys will have occupational breakdowns that allow you to find what is the average or reasonable wage for the personal services industry. And then option three, if it turns out that the bulk of the volunteering is taking place in a different kind of industry, it's not as much personal services based. It may be a construction kind of responsibility that volunteers more commonly perform or some combination of these two. Then the average wage in the construction industry could be used at least for that part of the volunteer work that takes place in that industry. So there are a number of different ways in which the wage level assigned to the volunteer work and therefore the value of the volunteer work can take place. So these are the different measures of the value. How do we go about getting the data? And so we turned then to the next aspect of the volunteer measurement task. We focus in on the surveys that can be used to pick up and measure the amount of volunteer work and other features of the volunteer activity. And here are basically two different strategies for gathering the data on volunteer activity. One of them is through establishment surveys. This is where you go out and survey the establishments that volunteers work in and for. They can be parts of the nonprofit sector. They can be now with our broadened TSE sector cooperatives. They can be mutuals and they can be social enterprises. These are all the establishments that volunteers might work for that would be in scope of our TSE sector. Remember, we're only interested in the volunteers that are doing work for the TSE sector because this is the TSE sector satellite account. And so we don't wanna measure volunteering for government or volunteering if that ever happens for businesses. We really wanna zero in on establishments that are part of this sector for the measurement. There's some advantages of the establishment approach. You get accurate industry information because you know where the establishment is in the industry classification. And you know the sector allocation. We know whether it's not only a hospital whether it is a nonprofit hospital or a cooperative hospital. The cons, those are the pros for establishment surveys. The cons are that the records may not be available. It's not as if these organizations regularly collect and maintain the data on their volunteers. Even if they say how many volunteers they've had they frequently do not carry data on the number of hours they perform or the chores that they perform. And without those two things we can't compute the full-time equivalent and we can't compute the value. And then finally and very importantly, establishment surveys are not gonna pick up the direct volunteer work. And we know that the direct volunteer work can often be much, much bigger than the establishment base. So we're missing a very, very big part of volunteering. So the second approach for measuring volunteering are through household surveys. And there are several different kinds. As you'll hear, we prefer the labor force surveys that every country does. And we'll explain why that's the case but what are the advantages? What are the pros of household surveys? They give us great coverage, including small and exempt units and especially direct volunteer work. If you're going out to people in their household and surveying them, particularly with large surveys of the sort that labor force surveys represent, you can pick up volunteering that's even for very informal organizations as well as person to person volunteer work. And that becomes a much bigger picture a much more complete picture of the volunteering that is taking place in the country. But there are cons as well. There are drawbacks to household surveys. There's something that statisticians refer to as selection and recall bias. Volunteering is a activity of around which there's a lot of social positive vibrations. And people may feel obliged to want to show off their volunteering or if they haven't done the volunteering they may be reluctant to confess that. And that means that they won't even answer the questions. And that means that you shrink the sample and the sample may contain only those people who are willing to claim that they volunteered. And this creates a very significant bias in the sample. It blows up the estimate of how big the volunteering is if only people who volunteer answer the survey and none of the ones who don't volunteer don't answer the survey. And then there's a very significant likelihood that the sector and industry allocation can be distorted. And why is this? Well, it's frequently the case that people don't know where, what kind of sector, what kind of entity they may be volunteering for whether it's a nonprofit or a government entity or even a for-profit entity. And so you may not get the clarity that we'd like to have about where the volunteering is taking place what kind of sector it is, what kind of industry it's associated with. So these are all issues in the design of the collection of data in volunteering. But suffice it to say in the manual that we've created the handbook, we very strongly recommend using household surveys. And there's several different kinds even of household surveys. And we have our preferences among those but there are multiple options available here as well. Clearly the preferred option are labor force surveys. Every country in the world has a very significant labor force survey program. It's frequently carried out by the same agency that does the satellite account that sometimes, I'm sorry, does the national income accounts but frequently it's in different locations, different agencies. But the labor force surveys have enormous advantages. They are the largest statistical system in most countries, largest in terms, for example, of the number of times they're executed, the number of times they're carried out even in the given year, they're typically done every year. And the samples are among the largest samples of any survey that is undertaken in most countries. So these are really rich surveys. And therefore we have focused our energies and recommendations on inserting a very small module focusing on volunteer work inside a labor force survey so that it minimizes the amount of time that is taken away from the other labor force issues that these surveys attempt to capture. They also have the advantage that you get a lot of demographic data already captured in these surveys. So you can know normally that there have been a certain number of volunteers but you know what occupation those volunteers have, you know their age, you know whether they're urban or rural, you know whether they're men or women. These are all pieces of data that are already being captured about these people in the regular labor force survey. And so we get access to that data by building our volunteer surveys into the labor force survey. So that's number one, but there are fallbacks. Obviously the labor force survey managers don't like to get too much other stuff into their labor force survey because they have problems convincing people to respond. And therefore they get very nervous of adding new items, new questions to the survey that lengthens it even if they are as short as our module, one and a half pages of questions. And so getting it inside the labor force survey is not always an option. We do have two other options. One of them are time use surveys. Many countries carry out these surveys. They're not as robust as the labor force surveys but they are household surveys. And basically the way they operate if you're not familiar with them is that surveys are administered to people and they agree to give a record of how they spend every hour of one week. And that or one day depending on how the survey is done. And in that day or in that week, if they've done volunteering, they would record what kind of volunteering it is, how many hours they spent, what activities they carried out, all the items of data that we would like to have. And this will become a similar household based account of the amount of volunteering that's taking place with a significant amount of detail about the type of volunteering, though it is a different classification system than is used in the labor force surveys. And then finally, many countries carry out a variety of general social surveys. Sometimes these are done every year with the same set of questions. Sometimes the focus of them changes from one year to the other. And that means that they don't have the continuity that the labor force surveys have. So just to focus in on the labor force surveys, here's what it gives us. The number of persons and the number of hours. So we get a very good picture of the volume of the volunteer effort. We have a classification structure in the labor force surveys that classify activity by industry, by occupation, by institutional sector, and by the type of work that's being done. And this is already structured into the labor force surveys and the classification structures that are used for the labor force surveys are also applied to the volunteer work. And therefore you can very easily compare the jobs and the industries of the volunteer work to the total amount of paid work in the same industry. So you can say that of all the activity that takes place, let's say in the health field, 40% of it is done by volunteers because you have the same classification of industry in the labor force survey for volunteers as you do for other workers. So this is another great advantage. You also get in the labor force survey, as I mentioned before, a significant amount of socio-demographic information. And since you have it for everybody who responds to the survey, you have it for those respondents who are themselves indicating that they have volunteered. You know, they're sex, you know, they're age group, you know whether they are working now with their labor force status, labor market statuses, and you know something about the geographic location of them within the country, whether it's urban or rural, whether it's in big cities or small cities. And then finally, with that data, we can derive the other information that we need. We can compute the full-time equivalent workers that volunteers represent because we know the number of volunteers and we know the number of their hours, and we should be able to find the typical full-time worker hours in that country. We also can compute the value of volunteer work because we'll know the activity and occupation that the volunteers perform. And then finally, we'll be able to compute the volunteering rates, which share of the population is actually engaged in volunteering. The time use survey has similar features to it, but just not as helpful. We'll know the number of persons, we'll know the number of hours per day, we'll know the classification of volunteer effort, we'll know the type of volunteering that they did, whether it's household-based or direct, I mean, organization-based or direct, we'll know something about the activity field that they're volunteering in. We'll know something about the socio-demographic information, the sex, the age group, the labor market status, geography, and we can do a decent job coming up with derived information about the full-time equivalence, the value of the work and the volunteering rates. We won't be able to make the kinds of comparisons that we would like to have in terms of the activities. The activity structure of the time use surveys is simply very different than the activity structures of the labor force survey. And therefore, we won't be able to make as clear a set of comparisons. So this is an example on this slide of how the time use surveys break up the activity of volunteers and others, but clearly you can see that it's a pretty fine grain, but it's not the same kind of structure. It breaks it out whether people are doing volunteer shopping or childcare or care for adults or help in enterprises. So it's not bad, but it is very different from the labor force survey breakdowns of classification of activity. So this is the picture of how we go about gathering data on volunteering. We have to do surveys in the countries where there are already surveys. Obviously they can be tapped so long as they capture these key variables. We wanna know how many people, but not only how many people we wanna know what number of hours they engage in volunteering. And we also wanna know what they did, what the actual tasks that they performed. And these are the features that are picked up by the module that we've created for insertion in the labor force surveys. So at the same time, we are convinced that this is the body of data that is extremely helpful for countries because it sheds light on an aspect of the third sector that has simply been overlooked in both the labor activity of the country and in the third sector in the country. Most of the countries that have measured volunteering have focused only on organization-based. We feel very strongly that we need to capture the direct volunteering as well. They're parts of the world in which the direct volunteering is much, much bigger than the organization-based for the good reason that they don't have as plentiful a nonprofit sector. And so without measuring the direct volunteering, we can frequently create an artificial disparity between more developed parts of the world and less developed ones that is misleading in terms of the volunteer activity that's carried out. So these are doable activities, but they do require that additional data needs to be assembled and that data is increasingly being found to be important in countries around the world. And so we hope that those of you who are carrying out and producing the TSE, the third or social economy satellite account are able to convince your colleagues in the labor force arena to add these additional questions to the labor force surveys. So thank you so much, appreciate your time. And as before, we stand ready to provide further assistance to your country, to your statistics agency. We have the capacity to provide more in-depth training and technical assistance. We've developed a whole variety of additional vehicles for carrying out these tasks, field guides, for example, that provide you with material that you can work through to apply the concepts of this third sector satellite account to your country. But it's very helpful to have a set of a contact point with the people who wrote the handbook to make sure that you're interpreting it the way it's being interpreted in other countries so that we come out of this process with data in your country that is consistent with the data that other countries are producing so that we can begin to make comparisons across countries with confidence that the approach being used is consistent from country to country. So our contact information is on this last slide. It's been on every one of these sessions. CCSS at jhu.edu, Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University.edu. And we stand ready to hear from you and to discuss how we can be of further help. Thank you so much.