1. LAMAS Working Group 12-13 December 2013
Agenda Item 4.1 Workshop on Monthly Unemployment

2. Organisation and attendance
Held in Heerlen, 7-8 November 2013
Jointly organised by Eurostat and CBS
Nearly 60 participants from 30 different national and international institutions
22 presentations in 6 sessions over 2 days

3. Goals Ultimate objective: Specific goals:
Enhance quality of Monthly Unemployment statistics through common guidelines
Specific goals:
Review and discuss methods
Identify best practices
Promote production directly by NSIs

4. Main findings

5. LFS is the basis for reliable MU statistics
Possible to streamline the LFS with relatively low costs and burden
Concentrate fieldwork in the 2 weeks after reference week
Streamline data transmission from the interviewers
Speed up editing operations
Ensure commitment from other production units to provide more timely input (e.g. population estimates)
Apply an appropriate distribution of the sample over geographical areas on a monthly basis

6. 4 methods identified Regression composite estimation
Structural time-series approach
Standard calibration of monthly samples (e.g. GREG)
Temporal disaggregation
Tests of these methods on the same data would be useful

7. Consistency is important
Consistency over time
Can always be ensured at macro level
Potentially more accurate if ensured by NSIs
Consistency between different periodicities
Monthly to quarterly or vice-versa
Implications of the different benchmarking approaches still to be assessed

8. Auxiliary information, trend estimates and revision policy
Registered unemployment as auxiliary information
Not always improves results. Misleading when it evolves differently from ILO unemployment
Trends
Not as informative as SA
Not directly comparable with SA
Revisions
Revisions are information, even if puzzling for users. Hiding revisions is not a solution

9. Volatility is an issue
Erratic movements erode the credibility of the monthly indicator
Some of the 4 methods mentioned before would likely help
Are trends or 3-month moving averages acceptable? If yes, in which situation?

10. Need for common solutions
Required quality (e.g. acceptable volatility and revisions),
Estimation methodologies
Nature of the data (e.g. pure monthly or 3-mma; seasonally-adjusted or trends, etc.)
Length of consistent time-series
Timeliness
Reference periods
Breakdowns

11. Next steps NSIs may be asked to cooperate
Eurostat drafts a discussion paper with proposals addressing the aforementioned issues
NSIs may be asked to cooperate
LAMAS discussion in 2014, possibly in June
A TF to settle possible remaining pending issues might be considered after a fist discussion
Depending on the progress made, guidelines could be agreed by end 2014 or first half 2015

12. LAMAS is invited to: Comment on the outcome of the workshop
Agree on the content and the schedule for the next steps