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

Coverage rates

Usually the undercoverage rate in the HLFS is around 20 percent. The overall undercoverage rate for the HLFS in the March 2021 quarter was 21 percent. This compares with 20.7 in the December 2020 quarter and 20.4 percent in the March 2020 quarter.

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 new sample will be rolled in over eight quarters. Each quarter, one-eighth of the households in the old sample is rotated out and replaced by a set of households in the new sample. The primary sampling units (PSUs) of the HLFS are small geographic areas contain approximately 70-100 households. Over time these PSUs can change in size due to population movements, and therefore need to be recreated periodically. December 2020 was the first quarter to be selected on newly created PSUs, which were last recreated in 2014. 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. For the March 2021 quarter, one quarter of the households are from the new sample.

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. As of the March 2021 quarter, there is sufficient data to allow for calculation and publication of a stable trend series.

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.

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.

QES

Response rate

The response rate for the Quarterly Employment Survey in the March 2021 quarter was 87.3 percent.

New survey design

The QES is a stratified sample representing most businesses in the New Zealand economy. The survey has been redeveloped to ensure the QES remains fit-for-purpose. Part of the redevelopment is a new representative sample which is integral to producing accurate measures. While efforts have been made to ensure consistency between the different designs, March 2021 is the first quarter of the new sample design and some changes are expected. A refresh of businesses and weights in the sample can cause larger movements than normal. Previous quarters have undergone back-casting to minimise inconsistencies in the output data. However, these are provisional and are not able to account for all changes. Hence, movement data should be used with caution. See Redesign of the quarterly employment survey for more data quality notes and information.

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 March 2021 quarter, respondents were asked to report pay rates on the reference date of February 15th 2021. The response rate was 95.6 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