November 18, 2015 2:00pm by David Farrar

No Fairfax these are not New Zealand’s riskiest industries

ACC statistics show New Zealand’s riskiest industries

Note that headlines are not written by the journalist who wrote the story:

The data:

Top 10 industries for ACC claims in 2014

Dairy cattle farming 11,748

House construction 8,741

Sheep and beef cattle farming 7,687

Meat processing 6,081

Fabricated metal product manufacturing 4,862

Supermarket and grocery stores 4,859

Electrical services 3,540

Plumbing services 2,775

This data does not show risk. It primarily shows how many people work in an industry. There were four times as many claims in supermarkets as in logging. Does that mean supermarkets are riskier? Of course not.

What would be useful is adjusting for population the number of claims for each industry.