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November, 1988, Vol. 111, No. 11

An evaluation of labor force
projections to 1985

Howard N Fullerton, Jr.

The final step in the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections process is evaluation of the results of each round of projections. Evaluations are helpful to the persons designing projections as well as to the users of the projections estimates themselves. Because the labor force projections are used in a variety of ways, there must be several criteria used to evaluate them.

The Bureau has always assessed each of its labor force projections, but has only published evaluations of the projections to 1975 and 1980.¹ Those evaluations showed the level of the male labor force projected to be too high and that of women too low—so low, in fact, that the overall level of the projected labor force was too low.

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Footnote

1 See Paul Ryscavage, "BLS labor force projections: a review of methods and results," Monthly Labor Review, April 1979, pp. 14-22; and Howard N. Fullerton, Jr., "How accurate were the projections of the 1980 labor force?" Monthly Labor Review, July 1982, pp. 15-21.

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