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Income, Employment, and Material Well-Being

Employment rate

It belongs to Income, Employment, and Material Well-Being, the part of the welfare catalog concerned with household resources, labour-market inclusion, and the material constraints that shape daily choices. The exact stored unit is Percentage of population aged 25-64 years, the geographic presentation is global, the…

current value78.1Percentage of population aged 25-64 years
Worse than normalImproving(+0.16)
GlobalAbove normal = betterimportance: 0.80unit: Percentage of population aged 25-64 years1 active driverUpdated Dec 2025

How to read it

Readings above the normal line are better than normal; readings below it are worse.

Indicator & its drivers over time

About this indicator

It belongs to Income, Employment, and Material Well-Being, the part of the welfare catalog concerned with household resources, labour-market inclusion, and the material constraints that shape daily choices. The exact stored unit is Percentage of population aged 25-64 years, the geographic presentation is global, the data publisher is Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the immutable numerical identity is OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1#21#AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL2|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY25T64#identity. The preliminary catalog candidate 6 is reconciled to the exact official series “Employment rate” in Percentage of population aged 25-64 years. This is a deliberate canonical correction: the database title names what the values actually measure, while the input wording remains in the reconciliation and audit trail. No hidden proxy label, fallback series, or silently substituted denominator remains. For catalog item 6, the provider definition is: Employment rate in the OECD Current Well-being dataflow, selected with AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL2|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY25T64. The dataset supplies country observations and status flags under one common SDMX structure; the displayed global comparison is an explicitly disclosed unweighted mean, not an OECD-published world total. That definition controls the denominator, population, reporting instrument, and statistical meaning. This Indicator records an observed outcome; it does not assert why that outcome changed. Welfare assessment for item 6 uses higherisbetter. Higher observations are treated as better welfare relative to the dated comparative reference. The direction applies to the stored official measure after the disclosed transformation, if any, rather than being inferred from an emotionally positive or negative title. No mathematical transformation is applied before persistence. Keeping title, series identity, unit, scope, transformation, and interpretation together prevents the record from mixing incompatible measurement concepts. The numerical observations for catalog item 6 were retrieved from OECD Well-being Data Monitor — Current Well-being through https://sdmx.oecd.org/public/rest/v1/data/OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1/?startPeriod=2018&endPeriod=2025 (opens in a new tab). The provider landing page is https://sdmx.oecd.org/public/rest/v1/data/OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1/?startPeriod=2018&endPeriod=2025 (opens in a new tab). The research package records the access date, exact dataset and series identifiers, dimension key AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL2|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY25T64, unit, provider metadata, transformation, and yearly aggregation label. The bounded Source and Evidence records can therefore reproduce which numbers were used without treating a generic homepage as row-level proof. Measurement provenance for item 6 follows this provider method: The OECD dataset is country-based, so each displayed year is an unweighted mean of the economies reporting the exact same measure, unit, and dimension key. This aggregation supports a transparent global comparison but is not described as an OECD-published world total. 2018 combines 47 reporting economies; 2019 combines 47 reporting economies; 2020 combines 46 reporting economies; 2021 combines 46 reporting economies; 2022 combines 46 reporting economies; 2023 combines 46 reporting economies; 2024 combines 45 reporting economies; 2025 combines 42 reporting economies. The output keeps full numerical precision through NormalLine, deviation, and interpretation calculations. Display clients may round for readability, but the persisted value is not squeezed into a zero-to-one score and is not rounded before calculation. The item 6 NormalLine starts on 2018-01-01 at 81.309 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years. 75th percentile of provider-published reporting-economy observations in the selected series and dimensions. The calculation keeps the source unit, dimensions, and transformation fixed and is a comparative reference rather than an invented statutory target. For zeroisnorm, the value is exactly zero and is never relaxed because non-zero observations are common. For every item 6 point, normallinevalue copies that dated line and deviationfromnormal is stored in raw-unit terms as observation minus NormalLine. Arithmetic sign and welfare sign are separate. A positive raw deviation is adverse for lowerisbetter, favourable for higherisbetter, and adverse above zero for zeroisnorm. The custom governance score retains its provider scale and uses the public methodology explanation rather than title sentiment. The complete retained sequence is 2018: 75.4465531915 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2019: 75.9633617021 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2020: 74.1325 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2021: 75.277826087 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2022: 77.0548695652 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2023: 77.522826087 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2024: 77.9201555556 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years; 2025: 78.081547619 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years. The first observation is 75.4465531915 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years in 2018 and the latest is 78.081547619 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years in 2025. The absolute change is 2.6349944275 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years, equivalent to 3.49253122381% of the absolute starting level. The minimum observed value is 74.1325 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years, and the maximum is 78.081547619 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years. For catalog item 6, the latest observation differs from the NormalLine by -3.227452381 Percentage of population aged 25-64 years and is classified as negative under higherisbetter. That classification is a deterministic comparison, not a causal explanation or editorial verdict. A movement may reflect real change, altered reporting coverage, revised estimates, a changed survey frame, or several of those at once. There are 8 retained item 6 observations in the selected 2018-2025 research window. The retained observations satisfy the minimum temporal rule without interpolation, extrapolation, or forward filling. Missing years are absent observations, not zeroes. The sequence is intentionally irregular when the official source is irregular, because a smooth-looking line created by invented values would be methodologically false. The displayed global item 6 sequence has one consistent numerical identity: OECD.WISE.WDP,DSDHSL@DFHSLCWB,1.1#21#AGE=T|DOMAIN=HSL2|EDUCATIONLEV=T|SEX=T|UNITMEASURE=PTPOPY25T64#identity. No second source series is spliced into a gap, no latest value is copied into a missing year, and no country-only observation is relabelled as a World value. If the source later adds or revises an observation, the update must arrive as a new reviewed research package with its own checksum and audit record. A defensible graph edge requires an existing Driver, direction, strength, lag, confidence, and Source/Evidence that supports the mechanism. The outcome series alone cannot establish that causal chain. For item 6, importance weight 0.8 is generated by indicator-importance-rubric-v1. Its five committed components are directness 0.85, population reach 0.7, persistence 0.8, effect on human capabilities 0.8, and overlap control 0.85. The formula weights them 0.35, 0.25, 0.20, 0.15, and 0.05, then rounds to the nearest 0.05. The value is deterministic and reproducible; it is not an intuitive score assigned while drafting prose. The 2018-2025 sequence for item 6 is too short for strong causal or structural claims. Cross-economy comparability can be affected by institutional definitions, survey coverage, modelled estimates, missing observations, classification practices, revisions, and unequal statistical capacity. A global aggregate or unweighted reporting-economy mean can also conceal distributional extremes and should not be used as an individual-level estimate. The item 6 NormalLine is a transparent comparative reference, not a claim that every jurisdiction has the same legal target or feasible frontier. The source may revise both historical points and metadata. Any later refresh must preserve the earlier Source, Evidence, checksum, and audit trail; it must not mutate the meaning of an already reviewed series identity.

Causal network

This indicator’s slice of Factrail’s verified causal web — the people, facts, drivers and welfare indicators it connects to. Select any node to trace a path.

By the Factrail desk · Method: how we source and score · Last reviewed