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

New Sample

Following every census we review the HLFS sample, and starting in the December 2020 quarter we have introduced some updates into the sample design.

The primary sampling units (PSUs) of the HLFS are small geographic areas containing approximately 70-100 households. Over time these PSUs can change in size due to population movements, and therefore need to be recreated periodically. From this quarter onwards, the sample will be selected on newly created PSUs, which were last recreated in 2014.

The new sample will be rolled in over eight quarters. Each quarter, one-eighth of the households in the old sample are rotated out and replaced by a set of households in the new sample.

The sample is selected from these new PSUs to ensure it is representative across different regions, urban areas, labour force participation rates and NZ Deprivation rates.

Every quarter we monitor the quality of the sample. This quarter extra monitoring was done to ensure that these changes to the sample were not driving unexpected movements in labour force outcomes. These updates do not include changes to the selection criteria or population of interest, nor to the HLFS methodology.

Changes to seasonal adjustment for HLFS series

Due to the unprecedented impact of COVID-19 in the June and September 2020 quarters, several seasonally adjusted series were specially treated to maintain a consistent estimate of the seasonal pattern. See Impact of COVID-19 on seasonally adjusted and trend series

As of the December 2020 quarter, the effect of COVID-19 on key labour market series is no longer significant enough to require continued intervention. Interventions that were implemented on the June and September quarters seasonally adjusted values will remain in place.

At this point the trend series is still not able to be accurately calculated, and publication of the trend series will remain suspended until we have sufficient data following the June and September quarters to stabilise them.

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.

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

QES

Response rate

The response rate for the Quarterly Employment Survey in the December 2020 quarter was 83.4 percent. While this was below our target response rate of 89 percent, we monitored coverage across industry and sector throughout the quarter and ensured the continued quality of our imputation process. We have therefore concluded the data is fit for purpose.

New survey design from next quarter

The QES will be refreshing its sample and moving to a new online survey design from the March 2021 quarter onwards. Features of the new design are a refreshed sample and a change to collecting most of the data at the business level by payroll rather than at geographic locations. We will continue to publish the same measures currently reported on, but anticipate some revisions as a result of these changes.

A new back series and further details about the upcoming changes to the updated Quarterly Employment Survey will be provided in advance of the March 2021 labour market release on May 5th.

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.

For the December 2020 quarter, respondents were asked to report pay rates on the reference date of November 15th 2020. The response rate was 95.8 percent, exceeding the target response rate of 94 percent (including targets of 100 percent for key firms, and 94 percent for all other respondents).

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