Comparability

Comparability - geographical

For international comparison the Labour Force Survey (LFS) is recommended. LFS is a survey based statistics. AKU-long-term unemployment is defined as unemployment for 12 consecutive months. In general, the level of AKU-long-term unemployed persons is on a higher level than in the register based long-term unemployment. This is because the LFS includes students and individuals who does not receive any benefits but still can be defined as LFS-unemployed.

Comparability over time

The long-term unemployment is comparable since January 2009.

Coherence - cross domain

The long-term unemployment statistics from Statistics Denmark varies from the way other organizations define long-term unemployment. E.g. the Danish Agency for Labour Market and Recruitment has a definition where a person is long-term unemployed when he/she has been gross unemployed for 80 percent of the last 12 month, and the person must be gross unemployed for the last week of the reference period. Other organizations have related definitions.

Coherence - internal

The register of Public Benefits has a high degree of internal consistency as the benefits included in the registry are controlled for internal overlap. This means that a person cannot be registered with two different benefits at the same time. No studies have been made of the consistency between the register of Public Benefits and the register of Employees. If the information from the two registers is inconsistence, the unemployment data from the register Public Benefits is used over Employment data.