Data on Private Sector pay

Sleepy

Why is it that the CSO don't have accurate data on average / median pay throughout the Irish economy?

I'd have thought that given access to the revenue's database(s) this kind of data should be extremely easy to obtain and analyze?

Data protection issues should be easily bypassable through creating views of the data that provided access to salaries, tax status (PAYE / Self Assessed), industry category etc. to avoid individuals or companies from being identified.

How is it so difficult to provide accurate data on this?

ei.sdraob

same thoughts exactly here and not only private sector, i couldnt find any data on the the health portion of the public sector (all them CSO graphs exclude health, maybe something to do with PPARs debacle)


the private data seems to be sort of there (http://www.cso.ie/px/pxeirestat/database/eirestat/National%20Employment%20Survey/National%20Employment%20Survey.asp), just split into various industries and not all in one place

as an employer they send me daily all sorts of forms to complete, i presume its same for other businesses

they actually quite nice if you ring them and ask for info, assuming that they arent on a work to rule now...

Sleepy

Would have thought public sector data would be even easier to obtain...

Any time I've seen the CSO data presented it's been said that the figures are only for Industry (Manufacturing, Mining & Utilities) & Finance which leaves out a fairly hefty majority of the Irish private sector. What sparked this thread was an article by Ronan Lyons on his blog (http://www.ronanlyons.com/2009/11/24/public-sector-pay-and-the-idea-of-intensive-not-extensive-cuts/) which says that the CSO data for the private sector excludes 1.2 million Irish workers in the private sector.

Count Dooku

So far this is the best what I found about private-public sector incomes distribution
Of coarse, civil servants couldn’t do it without any cheating and they included a lot of part timers, and as result they are looking very poor:rolleyes:, but as raw data it is the most detailed set of data in public domain produced by revenue for 2007
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/Xml/30/DAL20091103A.PDF
Search for 38669/09

Sleepy

I just don't get why even the CSO don't seem to have access to this data. I don't expect an interface on the net that I could use to slice and dice the data myself (though it'd be nice).

It just seems a little ridiculous that our statistics office can't provide accurate figures for average/median public sector wage v average/median private sector wage or industry comparisons without having to leave huge sections of the economy out of the figures they provide.

WalterMitty

Do CSO do surveys of average hours per week/day as in my experience private do longer hours(much of it unpaid). I always know which of my neighbours will be home early at night as its usually the public sector ones:o

sfakiaman

Sleepy wrote: »

Why is it that the CSO don't have accurate data on average / median pay throughout the Irish economy?

The CSO have figures for the mean and the median as linked by another poster. The problem is that most people do not know the definition of the terms mean, median and mode. The mean (average) is the total pay divided by the number of people in the sector. The median is the pay of the person in the middle ie if there are 101 people the median is person 51, fifty people below and fifty above. The mode (which is the one they are shy about) is the pay that occurs most frequently.

Sleepy

Aye, I'm aware of the differences between mean, mode and median alright.

I was just under the impression that the figures that ei.sdraob linked to fell foul of the gaps pointed out by Ronan Lyons regarding the absence of figures for huge tranches of the economy.

ei.sdraob

Sleepy wrote: »

Aye, I'm aware of the differences between mean, mode and median alright.

I was just under the impression that the figures that ei.sdraob linked to fell foul of the gaps pointed out by Ronan Lyons regarding the absence of figures for huge tranches of the economy.

yeh it would be interesting to see how some sectors of the economy have performed especially construction which got decimated

the lies, damned lies and then theres statistics


this crowd here also have quite alot of data > http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/statistics/search_database

and nice site to access all sort of stats


i wish Revenue would have release (anonymized of course) data, since they hold on to all sorts of juicy info such as actual selling prices of all properties and what people earn/declare
i presume its a case of various departments jealously guarding their databases

we need some sort of push like they have in america to release all sorts of info to the citizens, whole "open government" thingie
hell all sorts of fraud would disappear overnight of for example Revenue made peoples returns open to all, in a similar manner as CRO who put up company returns online
but thats a whole other thread worth of discussion

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