Labour Market Statistics: September 2020 quarter

#Period-specific information

##Response Rates

See New quality measures for the Household Labour Force Survey for more information on the sample rate and response rates.

##HLFS

###Impact of COVID-19 on collection Auckland went into level 3 lockdown at midday on Wednesday 12th August. The rest of NZ entered level 2 at the same time. The HLFS contact centre is based in Auckland. Interviewers were able to work from home so there were no days of missed phone interviewing.

Face-to-face interviewing was halted for the whole country on August 12th. Households that are in the HLFS for their first quarter are usually visited by a field interviewer, but given the shift to higher COVID alert levels, this was unable to happen from August 12th onwards. Instead, letters were sent to first-time households asking them to call Stats NZ. - this is the same approach that was used last quarter when field staff were unable to visit new households due to the nation-wide lockdown.

Outside of Auckland, interviewers returned to the field on September 8th. Face-to-face interviewing in Auckland resumed on 15th September, excluding areas which had COVID -19 cases. Although interviewers were back in the field, a cautious approach was taken for the whole country with very few HLFS interviews being done in person on the fist few days. Instead, field staff typically knocked on doors to get contact details or left a card with Stats NZ’s phone number in letterboxes.

HLFS respondents are typically in the survey for eight quarters or “waves”. Last quarter (June 2020), respondents were retained in the survey sample for a ninth wave in an attempt to mitigate the effects lockdown had on response rates. This quarter, the sample returned to its normal design of having respondents in for 8 quarters.

###Additive outlier treatment X13 is the tool used by Stats NZ to perform seasonal adjustment. If a value is sufficiently extreme due to a short-term break in the raw data, X13 may not fully account for the outlier.

Tests and analysis significantly indicate that the series listed below were impacted by the unusual events experienced this quarter related to Covid-19 and the lockdown:

• Male and female employed
• Male and female unemployed
• Male and female not in the labour force (NILF)
• Employed, aged 15-64 years
• Unemployed, aged 15-64 years
• Not in the labour force, aged 15-64 years
• Total actual hours worked

Like the June-2020 quarter, the September-2020 quarter has been treated as an additive outlier for these series. The outlier treatment effectively removes the September quarter from seasonal factor calculations and prevents the September quarter from causing undesirable revisions to current and historical seasonal factors.

Trend values for the September-2020 quarter are not being published, as the calculated trend value is not accurate this quarter. Trend series are slow to react to change, and will behave as if there were no Covid-19 or lockdown for some time. Reporting trend estimates will likely underestimate the effect of the pandemic.

###Outliers During the seasonal adjustment process, X-13-ARIMA-SEATS can give less weight to the irregular component. Specifically, if the estimated irregular component at a point in time is sufficiently large compared with the standard deviation of the irregular component as a whole, then the irregular component at that point can be downweighted or removed completely and re-estimated. We refer to such observations as partial- and zero-outliers, respectively. In practice, the downweighting of outliers does little to seasonally adjusted data, but the impact of the outliers on the trend series will generally be reduced. However, if an outlier ceases to be an outlier as more data becomes available, then significant revisions to the trend series become possible.

There were no outliers in our main series in the last year.

###Revisions to HLFS

Each quarter, we apply the seasonal adjustment process to the latest quarter and all previous quarters. Every estimate is subject to revision each quarter as new data is added, which means that seasonally adjusted estimates for previous quarters may change slightly. In practice, estimates more than two years from the end-point will change little.

The June 2020 quarter unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.0 percent after we applied seasonal adjustment.

This table lists the changes in estimates between the current and previous quarters for the seasonally adjusted data.

This table presents revisions for the trend estimates. Trend revisions are generally larger than those of the seasonally adjusted data.

The table below shows the average of all such absolute revisions, expressed relatively, and indicates to what extent the current estimates might be revised when the revised data for the next quarter becomes available.

##LCI

The LCI measures changes in salary and wage rates for a fixed quantity and quality of labour. LCI data is collected by postal and electronic surveys. During the September 2020 quarter, survey collections met the target collection rate of 94 percent (100 percent for key firms, and 94 percent for non-key firms).

Respondents were asked to report pay rates on the reference date of August 15th 2020. As in the previous quarter, the LCI included the COVID-19 wage subsidy as part of the labour cost.

##QES The target response rate for the QES is 89 percent. This was not met, with a final response rate of 86.0 percent. However, estimates are considered to be fit for purpose. In comparison, the response rates for previous September quarters were 87.2 percent in 2019, and 88.3 percent in 2018.

Additional guidance around inclusion of remaining wage subsidy extensions remained in the letter to respondents, though it was likely to affect fewer respondents in the September 2020 quarter. As previously, if employees who were unable to work were still being paid, hours paid were recorded at their contracted hourly rate.

##General information and methodology

For general information and methodology on the specific surveys within the labour market statistics release, please see the following Datainfo+ pages:

• Household Labour Force Survey
• Labour Cost Index
• Quarterly Employment Survey