Not Employed, Market Participant (NEMP): A Harmonised Variable Specification, with Field Test Results from Three National Statistical Systems

A recent contribution proposed a four-quadrant decomposition of economic activity and identified a previously unnamed population characterised by positive income in the absence of an employment relation, designating it YEET (Verhaegen, 2026). That contribution was taxonomic. It did not address operationalisation, and the term it introduced is not one that a national statistical office can adopt.

This paper supplies the missing specification. We propose NEMP (Not Employed, Market Participant) as the harmonised variable name for the quadrant, define its value labels, source variables, derivation logic, and edit rules, and situate it with respect to the framework established by the 19th ICLS resolution on work statistics. We report an inter-rater reliability study (n = 12 coders, 40 vignettes, kappa = .58), a three-language cognitive testing and back-translation exercise, and a field test embedded in existing labour force instruments across three national systems (n = 4,112).

Results are mixed and we report them as such. The derivation logic performs acceptably where the source variables exist, which is in one of the three systems tested. Inter-rater reliability is moderate overall but falls to kappa = .31 on the subset of vignettes involving unrealised positions, which is the subset the variable exists to capture. Back-translation returned a term meaning approximately "gambler" in two of three target languages, and we were unable to resolve this. Cross-national prevalence estimates ranged from 3.1% to 14.7%, a spread we attribute primarily to instrument differences rather than to genuine variation.

We recommend NEMP for inclusion in the next revision of the international standards, with the caveat that the variable is not currently measurable to the standard the standards require.