The statistic caption of agrarian salary men: Reflexions on its problems through an exercise of comparation between inhabitans and agrarian censuses (Argentina, 2001/2002)

Abstract

The count of the agricultural employment (particularly of the waged employment) using official statistical sources has presented several problems and limitations. The high levels of work instability, seasonality and informality have produced numerous difficulties in the quantification of rural employment. The recent processes which affect the agricultural work force (such as its residence urbanization, the reduction of productive and occupational cycles and the decline of labor requirements because of the mechanization of certain crops) seem to have increased those difficulties. Former approximations to theses problems showed that populations census and agricultural census throws divergent results in the quantification of the employees in agriculture. A comparative analysis of the results obtained in Argentina by the National Population and Households Census of 2001 and the National Agricultural Census of 2002 is presented in this paper. Its objective is to perform an approximation to the different numbers of agricultural wage earners which both sources provide. Besides, it will be attempted a link with the different agrarian and social structures and territories, trying to find out if they explain part of those divergent results. In order to accomplish those objectives, it was created a county-level database with the total number of agricultural wage earner. It also contained a set of indicators of the social and agrarian structure (quantity of pauper farmers, levels of urbanization, land distribution, etc.).