A national accounting system for labour market flows : an application to the Netherlands

This paper develops a national accounting system for the construction of consistent time series data for worker and job flows at the macro level. The construction method is applied for The Netherlands, and is based on the availability of actual time series and a number of additional assumptions. The reliability of the data depends on the availability of data from primary sources and can, in principle, be applied in each country, yielding an additional module to the labour accounts in the national accounts. We find our flow data to correspond to evidence found in surrounding countries and evidence derived from panel data sets following the seminal work of Davis and Haltiwanger on job destruction and creation. A sensitivity analysis app1ie.d to our main assumptions gives an indication of their importance.