South Korea Economically Active Population

KRACTIVEPOP, KRUNEMPCNT, KRPOP15, and KRNONACTIVE are four not-seasonally-adjusted labor-force accounting levels that KRED carries without transformation, each recorded exactly as published. All four rest on a standard labor-force framework (Hussmanns, Mehran, and Verma 1990), which classifies each person of working age as employed, unemployed, or outside the labor force by activity status, availability, and job-search criteria. The population aged fifteen and over is partitioned into the economically active population and the population outside the labor force, and the economically active population is in turn split into the employed and the unemployed count, so the four levels together trace one identity rather than four unrelated series.

Each level is read as the net outcome of continuous flows of entry, exit, and spell duration (Clark and Summers 1979), so that a single monthly reading summarizes the churn beneath a headline stock.

Within the cyclical-indicator tradition these labor readings are comoving series whose turning points cluster around aggregate reference cycles (Burns and Mitchell 1946). They are classified by their timing relative to the cycle (Mitchell and Burns 1938), their turns are dated by a reproducible algorithm (Bry and Boschan 1971), and they are placed within the diffusion- and composite-index apparatus (Moore 1961).

Labor aggregates such as these are recast as observable shadows of a latent state of the economy (Stock and Watson 1989; Stock and Watson 1991). Their measurement and timing properties are catalogued systematically (Zarnowitz 1992), and each value is treated as a monthly current-conditions signal (Shiskin 1961). Such atheoretical measurement, however, carries meaning only against an explicit model of the labor market (Koopmans 1947).

KRED reports each figure exactly as published and applies no transformation, neither rescaling, deflating, smoothing, annualizing, nor seasonal adjustment. Because the underlying series are not seasonally adjusted, each retains its within-year seasonal pattern, and the raw passthrough leaves that pattern intact.

The measurement basis is the household labor-force survey, in which each respondent's status is translated into a discrete activity category under the operational definitions of the economically active population, the employed, and the unemployed (Hussmanns, Mehran, and Verma 1990). The flow accounting that links those statuses across months decomposes the change in each level into entry, exit, and duration (Clark and Summers 1979).

The four levels stand in a fixed accounting identity, since the population aged fifteen and over is the sum of the economically active population and the population outside the labor force, and the economically active population is the sum of the employed and the unemployed count. KRED applies no adjustment to enforce or verify this identity across the four published levels, and each retains whatever revision or rounding the source vintage carries.

Within the cyclical-indicator tradition these levels are comoving series whose turning points cluster around aggregate reference cycles (Burns and Mitchell 1946), classified by their timing relative to a turn (Mitchell and Burns 1938), and cataloged systematically for their measurement and timing properties (Zarnowitz 1992). They are treated as noisy readings of a latent state of the economy under the dynamic-factor representation (Stock and Watson 1989; Stock and Watson 1991).

The cyclical reading of the resulting figures follows a reproducible turning-point algorithm that dates their specific cycles (Bry and Boschan 1971) and a codified embedding in diffusion and composite indexes (Moore 1961). The single-index dynamic-factor representation is formalized (Stock and Watson 1991), as is the monthly real-time construction (Shiskin 1961). This measurement procedure nonetheless presupposes an economic model for its interpretation (Koopmans 1947).

As the constituent counts of labor-force accounting, these levels anchor the reading of labor-market slack directly rather than through a derived ratio. Their clustered turning points define the cycle as comoving series (Burns and Mitchell 1946), and each is classified by its timing relative to a turn (Mitchell and Burns 1938).

A rising unemployed count alongside a shrinking economically active population signals a deepening of cyclical weakness through two channels at once, the layoff channel and the discouraged-worker exit from the labor force, because labor aggregates are treated as noisy readings of the latent state of the economy (Stock and Watson 1989; Stock and Watson 1991).

The levels play a standard role in composite cyclical assessment. Their place within diffusion- and composite-indicator systems is documented (Moore 1961; Zarnowitz 1992), turning-point dating separates cyclical from incidental movements (Bry and Boschan 1971), and their use as current-conditions gauges is formalized as a monthly update (Shiskin 1961).

Because the four levels are constituent counts rather than a single ratio, a stable headline participation rate can mask an offsetting rise in the unemployed count against a fall in the economically active population, and the flow decomposition beneath any of the four carries distinct welfare meaning (Clark and Summers 1979) within the labor-force framework that defines each category (Hussmanns, Mehran, and Verma 1990).

Labor-market conditions of this kind govern household income expectations, so these readings link to spending behavior (Katona 1951). Labor readings carry forward-looking content for consumption (Carroll, Fuhrer, and Wilcox 1994; Ludvigson 2004). The levels, however, inform but do not identify the mechanism (Koopmans 1947).

For markets these labor-force levels are a high-frequency read on cyclical timing, and their classification by cycle timing governs how a given print maps into expectations for the policy path (Mitchell and Burns 1938; Burns and Mitchell 1946).

Fixed-income and rate markets track them as components of a latent-state estimate (Stock and Watson 1989; Stock and Watson 1991). How much weight a surprise in any one of the four levels deserves is disciplined by the series' forecasting record (Zarnowitz 1992).

An unexpected move in the unemployed count or the economically active population shifts the expected trajectory of growth and inflation, because labor readings carry independent predictive content for household demand (Carroll, Fuhrer, and Wilcox 1994; Ludvigson 2004). Because the four levels are accounting components rather than a single ratio, a market reading one level in isolation risks missing an offsetting move in another, so the flow decomposition across all four disciplines the read (Clark and Summers 1979).

Each release is positioned within a composite and real-time signaling frame (Moore 1961; Shiskin 1961). Phase transitions are flagged by turning-point dating (Bry and Boschan 1971), and the levels are defined against a standard labor-force accounting framework (Hussmanns, Mehran, and Verma 1990).

The labor signal connects to consumer attitudes that feed risk appetite (Katona 1951). The same figures nonetheless support divergent trades depending on the model the trader imposes (Koopmans 1947).

KRACTIVEPOP is published as a not-seasonally-adjusted level of the economically active population, and the appropriate statistical object is its logarithm. The sample is 318 monthly observations spanning 2000-01 to 2026-06, and the unit-root triplet is fitted on the log level with a constant and trend.

The augmented Dickey-Fuller regression of Dickey and Fuller (1979), in the lag-augmented form of Said and Dickey (1984), does not reject the unit root with a statistic of −2.273 at p = 0.449, and the stationarity-null test of Kwiatkowski et al. (1992) rejects trend stationarity with a statistic of 0.383 at p < 0.01, so the augmented Dickey-Fuller and KPSS legs concur on a persistent reading. The nonparametric test of Phillips and Perron (1988) is the sole dissenter, rejecting the unit root with a statistic of −5.667 at p = 0.000, which is the documented Phillips-Perron over-rejection toward spurious stationarity under near-unit moving-average errors rather than independent evidence of stationarity (Ng and Perron 2001), so no clean order of integration is assigned and the concurring reading is I(1).

Because the log level is not a clean stationary object, the portmanteau and the break search are run on its first difference, since a level portmanteau on a near-unit-root series reads mechanical near-unit autocorrelation and a level mean-break search spuriously segments a stochastic trend (Perron 1989; Hamilton 2018). The portmanteau statistic of Ljung and Box (1978), refining the form of Box and Pierce (1970), rejects the white-noise null on the differenced log level, with Q = 506.35 at lag 12 and Q = 990.25 at lag 24, each at p = 0.000, and the multiple-break procedure of Bai and Perron (1998), computed by the dynamic-programming algorithm of Bai and Perron (2003), locates no break in the mean of the differenced series.

Seasonal tests are appropriate on this unadjusted monthly level. The seasonal-unit-root test of Hylleberg et al. (1990), with the monthly mechanics of Beaulieu and Miron (1993), rejects unit roots at the seasonal frequencies with a statistic of 106.955 at p = 0.000, while the seasonal dummies are jointly significant with an F statistic of 128.449 at p = 0.000, so the seasonality is present and deterministic rather than stochastic, consistent with the stationary-seasonality reading of Canova and Hansen (1995) and with the not-seasonally-adjusted character of the series (Ghysels and Osborn 2001).