Labour Market Statistics: September 2018 quarter

Labour Market Statistics: September 2018 quarter ^en-NZ

Labour Market Statistics: September 2018 quarter ^en-NZ

#Period-specific information
##Response Rates

Survey	Reference period	Response rate	Sample rate
HLFS	Each week during the quarter (8 July 2018 – 6 October 2018)	Target: 90 percent Achieved: 80.2 percent	Target: 76 percent Achieved: 72.1 percent
QES	The pay week ending on, or before, 20 August 2018	Target: 89 percent Achieved: 88.3 percent	N/A
LCI	Pay rates at 15 August 2018	Target: 94 percent Achieved: 94.0 percent	N/A

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

##HLFS

###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.

###HLFS pre- and post-calibration weight The following figure shows that while the distribution of the pre- and post-calibration weights differs within a quarter, the difference between the weights typically does not change from quarter to quarter.

The undercoverage rate indicates how representative the pre-calibrated sample is. The higher the undercoverage rate, the less representative the pre-calibrated sample.

Usually the undercoverage rate in the HLFS is about 20 percent. The overall undercoverage rate for the HLFS in the September 2018 quarter was 18.6 percent. This compares with 19.3 in the June 2018 quarter and 18.8 percent in the September 2017 quarter.

###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 2018 quarter unemployment rate was revised to 4.4 percent after we applied seasonal adjustment.

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

Percent revision from last estimate, seasonally adjusted
Quarter	Male employed	Female employed	Male unemployed	Female unemployed	Male not in labour force	Female not in labour force
Sep 2017	-0.1	-0.1	0.34	1.45	0.1	0
Dec 2017	0.01	0	0.08	-0.07	0	0.02
Mar 2018	-0.01	0	0.52	0.21	-0.04	0.04
Jun 2018	0.11	0.11	-1.02	-1.72	-0.07	-0.05

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

Percent revision from last estimate, trend
Quarter	Male employed	Female employed	Male unemployed	Female unemployed	Male not in labour force	Female not in labour force
Sep 2017	-0.05	0.14	0.52	1.31	0.12	0.05
Dec 2017	-0.03	0.04	0.29	0.45	0.01	0.05
Mar 2018	-0.02	-0.03	0.59	0.23	0	0.06
Jun 2018	0.26	0.15	-2.91	-3.46	-0.19	-0.23

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.

Mean absolute percent revisions
	Seasonally adjusted		Trend
	1-step	4-step	1-step	4-step
Male employed	0.05	0.08	0.17	0.17
Female employed	0.06	0.11	0.24	0.24
Male unemployed	0.47	0.75	1.79	1.81
Female unemployed	0.52	0.87	1.92	2.03
Male not in labour force	0.1	0.17	0.38	0.38
Female not in labour force	0.09	0.14	0.37	0.39

##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

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