ILO Labour Statistics (ILOSTAT) MCP Server

What is ILO Labour Statistics (ILOSTAT) MCP Server?

A provenance-first MCP server for ILOSTAT, the statistical database of the International Labour Organization. It gives an AI assistant direct access to global labour data — unemployment, employment, wages, hours, informality — over the ILO's public SDMX API.

No installation, no account, no API key. Point a client at the hosted endpoint and ask.

Independent project: an unofficial, community-built client of the ILO's public data. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the ILO.

How to use it

Hosted — nothing to install:

https://ilo.sidneybissoli.com/mcp

Local, for Claude Desktop, Cursor and other MCP clients:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ilo-mcp-server": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "ilo-mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

Key features

Four tools, deliberately

• ilo_search_indicators — find an indicator by what it measures, not by its SDMX code
• ilo_get_indicator_metadata — what a series actually contains, before pulling it
• ilo_list_dimension_values — the valid values for each dimension (country, sex, age band, classification), so a query is built from the real domain instead of guessed
• ilo_get_data — the observations, filtered by country, period and dimensions

Small on purpose: every tool a server exposes costs context in every client session. Four cover ILOSTAT without sprawling into one tool per question.

Three guided prompts, for the questions people actually bring

• compare countries on the same indicator
• build a country labour profile
• trace an indicator's trend over time

Provenance on every response — source URL, data vintage, retrieval timestamp and the licence terms of the data. When the source is an international organisation, a figure that can't be cited is a figure that can't be used.

Use cases

• "What is youth unemployment in Brazil, and how does it compare with Argentina and Chile?"
• "Show the trend in informal employment in Colombia over the last decade."
• "What is the gender wage gap in the OECD countries ILOSTAT covers?"
• "Build a labour profile for Portugal: employment, unemployment, hours, informality."
• "Qual a taxa de desemprego juvenil no Brasil segundo a OIT?"
• Comparative labour research needing figures traceable to the issuing body
• Journalism and policy work where the licence of the data matters as much as the number