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Cellphones can track unemployment in real-time

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2015
Using cellphone data to project economic change would allow almost real-time tracking of the economy, say researchers.
Using cellphone data to project economic change would allow almost real-time tracking of the economy, say researchers.

If you leave your job, chances are your pattern of cellphone use will also change. Without a commute or workspace, it stands to reason, most people will make a higher portion of their calls from home and they might make fewer calls, too.

This is according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, who have shown mobile phone data can provide rapid insight into employment levels, because people's communications patterns change noticeably when they are not working.

Using a plant closing in Europe as the basis for the study, the researchers found, in the months following job cuts, the total number of calls made by laid-off individuals dropped by 51% compared with working residents, and by 41% compared with all phone users.

The number of calls made by a newly unemployed worker to someone in the town where they had worked fell by five percentage points, and even the number of individual cellphone towers needed to transmit the calls of unemployed workers dropped by around 20%.

Jameson Toole, co-author of the research paper from MIT's Engineering Systems Division, says people's social behaviour diminishes when they are laid off work. "That might be one of the ways layoffs have these negative consequences. It hurts the networks that might help people find the next job."

Unemployment rate

The paper, recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, builds a model of cellphone usage that lets the researchers correlate cellphone usage patterns with aggregate changes in employment.

The researchers believe the phone data closely aligns with standard unemployment measures, and may allow analysts to make unemployment projections two to eight weeks faster than those made using traditional methods.

"Using mobile phone data to project economic change would allow almost real-time tracking of the economy, and at very fine spatial granularities - both of which are impossible given current methods of collecting economic statistics," says David Lazer, a professor at Northeastern University and a co-author of the paper.

On Tuesday - Youth Day - president Jacob Zuma highlighted SA's unemployment plight during a commemorative speech delivered in Pretoria. He spoke about the "triple challenge" the youth of today faces - that of poverty, inequality and unemployment.

He said the problem of unemployment persists today because "the economy is not growing as fast as we want to and is not creating as many jobs as we need". The economy gained 1.3% in the first quarter of the year.

According to Statistics SA, SA's official unemployment rate increased to 26.4% in the first quarter of 2015, from 24.3% in the last quarter of 2014.

The country's unemployment rate averaged 25.27% 2000 until 2015, reaching an all-time high of 31.2% in the first quarter of 2003 and a record low of 21.5% in the fourth quarter of 2008. Unions have traditionally put unemployment at around 40% because Statistics SA does not count discouraged work seekers.

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