Unemployment is useful and relevant to measuring sustainable development, especially if uniformly measured over time, and considered with other socioeconomic indicators. It should be noted, however, that it is common to find people working full-time but remaining poor due to the particular social conditions and type of industrial relations prevalent in their country, industry, or occupation. This indicator is linked to other socioeconomic indicators such as poverty measures and adult literacy. Some particular groups, such as the armed forces or other populations living in institutions, nomadic people, etc. may be excluded. In countries where compulsory schooling and legislation on the minimum age for admission to employment have broad coverage and are widely respected, the age specified in these regulations may be used as a basis for determining an appropriate minimum age limit for measuring the economically active population.
Some countries also determine a maximum age for inclusion in the labour force.
For example, one week or a day. Estimates according to the international standards can in practice be made most reliably on the basis of data collected through household surveys and population censuses. Some of the criteria specified in the international standards can only be implemented precisely through personal interviews. This is the only data source which, on a regular basis and with an appropriate survey design, can cover virtually the entire population of a country, all branches of economic activity, sectors of the economy, types of activity status and categories of workers and which allow joint, mutually exclusive measurement of the employed, unemployed and economically inactive. The 1982 international standards introduced a provision which allows for the relaxation of the seeking work criterion in situations where the conventional means of seeking work are of limited relevance, where the labour market is largely unorganised or of limited scope, where labour absorption is at the time inadequate, or where the labour force is largely self-employed .