1. LAMAS Working Group 7-8 December 2015
Agenda Item 4.2 Follow-up task force quality
15 min

2. Quality improvement LFS
2009: Recommendations of the Task Force on the quality of the Labour Force Survey
2010: LAMAS agreement to monitor implementation
2011: First status report
2012: Second status report
Dear colleagues,
As I am certain you all know well, the task force on the quality of the LFS delivered a long list of recommended improvements six years ago. This led to national action plans, and a substantial amount of important work. To keep an eye on the progress the LAMAS asked Eurostat to deliver regular status reports. This was done in 2011 and in As this is a quite time consuming exercise for both us and for you, it was decided in the 2012 December LAMAS to stop having annual reports. Therefore there has been a break since then, and now we present the third report, which, unless you want it otherwise, also will be the last one.

3. Status 2015
To keep things light and simple at the end of a long meeting, I will just show you this one graph with the total overview of the status of the actions, by recommendation theme.
It is highly likely that this task force with its list of recommendations is the one in the history of LFS task forces with the most impact in terms of total follow-up work in the NSIs. We see here in the total line that it has resulted in over 550 individual actions for the reporting countries (with national action plans). The list of recommendations has and is also been used actively in the IPA programmes for the candidate countries (which are not included here, because they did not have national action plans for the improvement of the LFS in 2010, when LAMAS asked for monitoring of progress), so the total number of actions is closer to 600.
In this chart we see the situation as it is now, and the black dots are the completion rates per theme three years ago. So for instance for the last theme of sampling, we see that the completion rate has gone from 30% to 75% now since the last status report in December Clearly a lot of good work has been done, and we'd like to thank you all for it.
As a concrete example of improvement: in 2010 there were an average of 82 calendar days between the end of the reference period and Eurostat dissemination of national data. In 2014 the corresponding number was 33.
Over this period we also have that all of the participating countries have revised the weights to reflect new population estimates.

4. LAMAS is invited to comment on:
delays for the themes 'info for users', 'weighting' and 'coherence'
future national plans for the delayed actions
The LAMAS members are invited to comment:
• on delays for the themes 'info for users', 'weighting' and 'coherence'
• on future national plans for the delayed actions.
Add points from EoV if necessary