Manpower Research and Statistics Department

Our Mission

The Manpower Research and Statistics Department (MRSD) aims to provide timely and reliable national statistical information on the labour market to facilitate informed decision-making within the government and the community at large.

Our Work and Services

We provide an extensive array of statistics and analysis on Singapore's workforce and the state of the labour market for online viewing and downloading. The statistical information that we provide helps the government in shaping manpower policies and programmes and facilitates informed decision making by employers, workers and job seekers.

Our work is organised broadly along four key processes. In the first stage, we collect information from individuals and establishments through national surveys and administrative sources to compile important national statistics on employment, unemployment, retrenchment, job vacancies, wages, labour turnover, etc. We then process and generate the statistics. Next, we study and analyse the data to make sense of it with a view to spotting emerging patterns and trends. The last part of our work involves disseminating our findings to the government and the community at large.

The activities of collection, compilation and publication of statistics are governed by the provisions of the Statistics Act (Chapter 317) which also spells out the legislative authority and responsibility of the Director, MRSD.

Our Performance Pledge

Confidentiality To uphold the integrity of the statistical system, our statistical activities are governed by the provisions of the Statistics Act (Chapter 317), which emphasise strict confidentiality of information collected from individuals and establishments.

Quality Our statistics are produced to high professional standards. Our labour market statistics conforms to the international guidelines on concepts and definitions recommended by the International Labour Organisation. Along with Singapore's subscription to the Special Data Dissemination Standards (SDDS) established by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), our statistical activities for key data on unemployment and employment figures are guided by four dimensions namely: i) coverage; periodicity and timeliness of the data; ii) access by the public; iii) integrity of the disseminated data; and iv) quality of the disseminated data. In terms of classification of data, we follow the national statistical classification standards prescribed by the Chief Statistician of Singapore.

Timeliness Understanding that labour market statistics are important indicators in the monitoring of the economy, we strive towards the earliest possible release of data while balancing the need to maintain data quality. We provide our data users with an Advance Release Calendar of our regular statistical releases. The adherence to the release dates serves as the service standard we commit to users.

Accessibility We provide an extensive range of products and services which can be readily accessed by the public. These include making available the most current labour market statistics and publications on the website for viewing and free downloading. Users can also subscribe to our email alerts for first-hand notification on our new releases.

Relevance Identifying user needs and addressing these as far as possible is one of MRSD's key tasks. We continuously review the relevance of our statistical data to meet the needs of the changing socio-economic environment.