International Labour Organization

What You're Getting

ILOSTAT provides harmonized global labor statistics covering 200+ countries — unemployment, employment by sector and status, wages, working hours, labor productivity, occupational safety, and social protection. Data is largely annual; some quarterly for selected countries. The ILO harmonizes national data to enable cross-country comparison. Key indicators: unemployment rate (UNE_DEAP_SEX_AGE_RT), employment by economic activity (EMP_TEMP_SEX_ECO_NB), and labor force participation rate.

Ingestion Strategy

Use the ILOSTAT API (SDMX 2.1) — no authentication required. For bulk loads, the ILOSTAT bulk download files (CSV by dataset) are the most efficient. The ILOSTAT Data Explorer also provides Excel/CSV export per indicator. Key bulk file endpoint follows SDMX conventions.

import requests, pandas as pd, io

# Unemployment rate via ILOSTAT SDMX API
url = "https://sdmx.ilo.org/rest/data/ILO,DF_UNE_DEAP_SEX_AGE_RT,1.0/all"
params = {
    "startPeriod": "2010",
    "format": "csvdata"
}
r = requests.get(url, params=params, timeout=120)
df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(r.text))

Rate Limits & API Details

• No authentication; no published rate limit — responses can be large, use startPeriod filters
• SDMX 2.1 base: sdmx.ilo.org/rest
• Bulk download: ilostat.ilo.org/resources/ilostat-bulk-download/
• Data Explorer: ilostat.ilo.org/data/ (manual CSV/Excel export)

Schema Stability

ILO indicator codes (e.g. UNE_DEAP_SEX_AGE_RT) are documented and stable. Country codes follow ISO 3166 alpha-2. The ILO periodically revises historical estimates when national methodologies change — store the download date as a versioning column. Sex codes: SEX_T (total), SEX_M, SEX_F.

Data Quality Gotchas

• Harmonization means imputation: ILO modelled estimates fill gaps in national data — distinguish between national survey data and modelled estimates using the OBS_STATUS flag
• Annual lag: most countries report with 1–2 year lag; recent years have heavy imputation
• Frequency inconsistency: some indicators are annual for most countries but quarterly for ILO members with strong statistical offices
• Definitions vary: ILO harmonizes but national definitions of "unemployment" still vary; read the indicator methodology notes

Tool Compatibility

• Python: ilostat PyPI package provides data access; pandasdmx for SDMX
• R: Rilostat CRAN package (ILO-maintained)
• Bulk CSV downloads load into any warehouse
• Not supported by major Airbyte connectors

Benchmarking Approach

Global unemployment rate should be ~5–6% for 2022. Total employed persons globally: ~3.3B. For G20 countries, verify unemployment rate aligns within 1 percentage point of national statistics office published figure (ILO harmonizes, not replaces). Alert if coverage drops below 150 countries for a given indicator-year. Track OBS_STATUS = modelled estimate ratio — alert if >60% of observations are modelled for a key country.