A cost-effective strategy for provincial unemployment estimation: A small area approach

This paper primarily aims at proposing a cost-effective strategy to estimate the intercensal unemployment rate at the provincial level in Iran. Taking advantage of the small area estimation (SAE) methods, this strategy is based on a single sampling at the national level. Three methods of synthetic, composite, and empirical Bayes estimators are used to find the indirect estimates of interest for the year 1996. Findings not only confirm the adequacy of the suggested strategy, but they also indicate that the composite and empirical Bayes estimators perform well and similarly.