covers housing and asset ownership, risks and coping mechanisms, and coverage of social protection programs on the household level. Interviews were done in December 2014 and January 2015. For the first time for a large-scale household survey in Bhutan, tablet-based computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI) were conducted. The objective was to improve data quality and streamline data analysis. As another measure to assure high data quality, all respondents were asked for their cellphone numbers and during a meticulous data cleaning exercise these numbers were used to reach out to respondents in case any inconsistencies or missing values had been discovered in the raw BLFS data.<sup>**1**</sup> The BLFS contains information on household members’ monthly earnings and weekly hours. Both variables are available for dependent as well as own-account workers. Under the assumption that each month consists of 4.35 weeks this makes it possible to construct a measure for hourly wages.<sup>2</sup> The survey also ascertains whether a worker is employed in the civil service, other government agencies, the armed forces or state-owned enterprises (which following ILO, 2009, together constitute the public sector), in agriculture or private enterprises (defined henceforth as the private sector) or by a non-governmental organization, international non-governmental organization or community service organization (a very small group of workers that is henceforth disregarded).

Additionally, the 2014 edition of the BLFS questions respondents about a wide range of household members’ individual characteristics useful for an analysis of wages. These include information on labor market characteristics such as whether an individual is a regular paid employee, casually paid employee, contract worker, own-account worker or unpaid family worker. Henceforth, unpaid family workers and/or workers for whom an hourly wage cannot be discerned will not be considered. Comprehensive sectoral information is also available in the BLFS. For the purpose of this study, this information is aggregated to the level of 16 broad sectors according to the ISIC Rev. 3 classification (agriculture, hunting and forestry; fishing; mining and quarrying; manufacturing; electricity, gas and water supply; construction; wholesale and retail trade; hotels and restaurants;

> 1 To verify the reliability of the BLFS data, Appendix A compares size, structure and annual average pay of Bhutan’s civil service according to the BLFS with administrative data from the country’s Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC, 2014, 2015). While some noteworthy discrepancies between the civil service employment structure according to the BLFS data and RCSC (2014) can be documented, the overall size, structure and annual average pay of the civil service is similar according to both sources.

> 2 Implicitly, the construction of the measure for hourly wages assumes equal pay structures in the public and the private sectors. Alternative computations not reported here but available upon request document that the main results of Section 4 are robust to instead constructing the wage variable under the assumption that a month consists of four weeks for public sector workers and 4.5 weeks for private sector workers (or _vice versa_ ).

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