In the case of employment, the statistics traditionally used in Chile are built by extrapolating the results of surveys to the population, using expansion factors, which in turn are based on population projections that are updated at every Census. Thus, between one update and the next, the surveys do not have the capacity to reflect exogenous changes in demographics. Therefore, a phenomenon of immigration of the magnitude that our country has experienced in recent years cannot be represented correctly until the expansion factors are updated. So, information about levels in the labor force such as employment and other aggregates delivered by the different surveys do not necessarily provide a faithful representation of the reality whenever substantive changes occur in population aggregates. As you can see in Box III.3 of the Report, using different sources of information a revision can be made of the evolution of employment, factoring in the impact of the migrant inflows we have seen recently in Chile. In particular, this exercise shows that between 2016 and 2018 employment would have grown between one and two percentage points annually more than shown by the surveys, that is, between double and triple the data obtained from the surveys over the last few years. The difference in growth originates in the assumptions made regarding the new immigrants that entered the country in the last year, which are not available as yet.
4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches