Issues In Integrating Labour's Dual Roles of Input to Production and Social Resource Berkeley Hill, Federico Perali and Cristina Salvioni Abstract The conceptual foundations of agricultural labour statistics in the EU are examined. In view of the present and anticipated uses within a reformed CAP, understanding the behaviour of the households which supply this labour is critical. Existing statistics are inadequate at answering questions concerning the diversified activities that are central to the CAP and the coverage of own-production that is significant in the new Member States. 1 Introduction Labour force statistics form an established part of the array of indicators used within agricultural and rural development policy. In the European Union (EU) they are based on two sources of data, firstly general employment statistics in which people are allocated to economic sectors (such as agriculture) according to the one in which they mainly work and, secondly, surveys of agricultural holdings that cover all the labour found there, irrespective of whether agriculture is its main occupation 1 . These statistics have traditional roles in providing information on the size of the agricultural industry in terms of the numbers of people that are engaged in it and their basic demographic and socio-economic characteristics. Identifying the people who are engaged in agriculture is a major step in the process of assessing whether the fundamental policy aim (in the European Union) of ensuring a fair standard of living of the agricultural community is being achieved. In a separate way they also are used to monitor the extent of labour input to the production process and the characteristics of the units of production. In the EU labour input estimates are used in combination with economic accounts for the activity of agricultural production to show how the residual rewards from agriculture per unit of labour input are developing over time, a prominent indicator within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and one highly sensitive to the reliability of labour input statistics. For this purpose a distinction has to be made between salaried and non-salaried labour, with the input being measured in Annual Work Units (Eurostat 2000). A related use is to calculations on how productivity is changing (both labour productivity and total factor productivity). The two roles (social orientation and factor-input orientation), while overlapping, require rather 1 The latest available edition of the annual Agricultural Situation in the European Union gives from the general employment statistics, for both agriculture and industry, numbers employed and separate breakdowns into paid and self-employed, full-time and part-time, and age band. Statistics based on surveys of agricultural holdings give total numbers working on the holdings, and their volume of labour in Annual Work Units. Labour is broken down into family and non- family (subdivided into regular and non-regular), by gender, whether there is other gainful employment (subdivided into main or secondary) and according to the percentage of working time spent on the holding, in three broad bands.