Comparability

Comparability - geographical

The Labour Force Survey is the Danish contribution to the European Labour Force Survey. Topics, categories, definitions and so on are laid down by the European Union which makes the surveys suitable for both overall and very specific international comparisons of labour market issues. Lots of countries outside the EU also carry out similar Labour Force Surveys. This means that the Danish Labour Force Survey is the best Danish survey for international comparisons of labour market statistics. In order to obtain the largest possible comparability with the monthly results for Denmark published by Eurostat, there will be revisions of the monthly results when the quarters are closed. The monthly results are simply benchmarked up against the quarterly results. Eurostat

Comparability over time

1984 was the first time Denmark started a large survey of the population's labour market status. Though, it was conducted only once a year during spring time. In 1994 the Labour Force Survey was established as a quarterly survey. From this time the survey has been conducted continuously every day all through the year. The monthly LFS was published for the first time in October 2013 with numbers for September 2013. With the weighting scheme from 2019, the quarterly series has been brought back to January 2008. The monthly series has been adapted to the level of the quarterly series and will also be revised back to 2008 in Eurostat's databases. 2008 has been chosen as the starting year, because a significant part of the new sources in the weighting scheme begins in 2008. This constitutes a break in series, which must be taken into consideration if long time series are constructed.

At the beginning of 2022, the publication of monthly figures from the Labor Force Survey (LFS) was discontinued, due to major deviations between quarterly and monthly figures. A new and improved method had been adopted on quarterly data, but had not yet been implemented for monthly data. This gave too great a difference between the figures for continued publication to be meaningful. Subsequently, work has been done to introduce a method that is consistent with the new quarterly enumeration, and this method is behind the figures in the Statbank table AKU111M. Here you can find the AKU unemployment rate, the employment rate and the participation rate, with and without seasonal correction monthly from 2008. The survey follows the international labor market organization ILO's guidelines for calculations of the population's attachment to the labor market.

Coherence - cross domain

The most used unemployment statistics in Denmark is registered unemployment, which is based on the information from every public employment office and unemployment insurance funds in Denmark. The purpose is to measure the number of unemployed people who are receiving a social benefit. The registered unemployment measures the number of unemployed people in full-time equivalents (FTE's). This means that part-time unemployed for example a person with a small job, who also receives complementary unemployment benefit from the local job-centre under the Danish Social Assistance Act is calculated as a certain percentage of a full-time unemployed. A half-time unemployed person will for example count as ½ FTE unemployed. The Labour Force Survey does not require any payment of social benefits. This is because of the different labour market models around Europe. Not all countries have a policy, where people register themselves when unemployed. For the sake of international comparison, the important issue is therefore whether or not people have been working or not, not whether people are registered or not in the LFS.

In the Labour Force Survey, people are defined as employed if they have worked for at least one hour in the reference week. A person, who works 15 hours a week and who also receives supplementary unemployment benefit will be defined as employed in the Labour Force Survey. In the registered unemployment this person will be included in the group of unemployed people, because the supplementary unemployment benefit reflects registration as unemployed at a public employment office.

Read about the difference between registered unemployment in the Labour Force Survey and the Register of Labour Market Statistics

The issue whether or not a person has to be registered as unemployed at a public employment office to be considered unemployed or not is a distinct difference between the Labour Force Survey and registered unemployment.

According to the Danish Labour Force Survey, only around half of the unemployed persons are receiving unemployment benefit. The other half consists of students looking for work and people who are actively looking for a job and declare that they can start a job within two weeks, although they are not registered as unemployed. At the same time some of the persons included in the registered as unemployed unemployment statistics are not considered unemployed in the Labour Force Survey. For example people, who do not actively look for a job and/or who are not able to start a job within two weeks. If people do not meet these criteria they are defined as outside the labour force or employed regardless if they are registered at a public employment office or not. Due to the different definitions of unemployment, the results from RAM and the Labour Force Survey vary.

Find more information on registered unemployment

Read about the difference between registered unemployment in the Labour Force Survey and the Register of Labour Market Statistics

Other employment statistics

Register based-labour force statistics (RAS): Both the Labour Force Survey and RAS examine the population´s labour market status. The Labour Force Survey is based on interviews, while RAS is based on administrative sources - among others the e-income register, the work place register, the central business register, the register with information about persons without ordinary employment, the educational register and the population register. Due to the fact that it takes time to gather information from several of the administrative registers the data processing time is a bit more than a year for RAS. This means that information on people registered as fulltime unemployed in November 2005 will be published in the spring of 2007. The Statistics are scheduled to be published within 16 months after the end of the reference year. The degree of consistency between the Labour Force Survey and RAS is usually high with respect to the key results, for example the number of employed and unemployed people in Denmark. However, for some variables for example - full-time/ part-time employees - significant differences appear. This is due to completely different compilation methods. Some information on the population's labour market relations is better collected by RAS than by the Labour Force Survey, because RAS's base is the total population, whereas the Labour Force Survey is based on a sample size of the population. In a sample, small groups - like immigrant groups - can be unreliable due to too high sampling error. In these areas RAS is a good substitute. However, if the wish for example is to know of how many part-time employees who would like to work full-time; how many people that work at home regularly; or how many people that have found their job with the help of a public employment office, the Labour Force Survey is the best statistics, because RAS does not measure the subjective wants and wishes of individuals.

Read more about Employment (In Danish only).

Coherence - internal

Nothing to add, since the basic data of the LFS is collected through surveys and therefore there is consistency in the questionnaire regarding the individual variable.