Quality report of the European Union : labour force survey : 2015 edition

The present report is the Quality Report on the European Union Labour Force Survey (EULFS) for the year 2014. The quality concept applied in this report is in conformity with the definition developed by the European Statistical System. In this definition quality consists of the following components: relevance, accuracy, timeliness and punctuality, accessibility and clarity, comparability and coherence. Each quality component consists also of several subcomponents. Each of the quality components is explained shortly at the start of each section in the following report. The individual country quality reports that were delivered to Eurostat during summer 2015 constitute the main source for the present report. Other sources that have been used or consulted are meta-data information collected by Eurostat, national quality reports from previous years, websites of the individual countries, the LFS datasets for 2014 and the documentation of the public free data set maintained by Eurostat. The present quality report follows closely the standard Quality Report format that has been developed within Eurostat. In many instances, however, it is impossible to present the data exactly as prescribed by the standard Eurostat format, as this is geared to report homogeneous production processes within each country. This is not the case for the EULFS, which is the result of the collection of national data sets from NSIs. In some cases the information from the individual countries was not sufficient to provide an exact summary. The quality reports provide also information on unemployment statistics at regional level, as the reporting of quality is a joint effort of the units within Eurostat dealing with labour force surveys and with regional employment and unemployment. The last chapter of the present report covers the regional aspects. This quality report complements the methodological working paper describing the characteristics of the national surveys in the Member States, Candidate Countries and the EFTA countries, also available on the Eurostat website. Eurostat wishes to thank the many experts in the countries participating in the conduct of the EU-LFS, providing the data and descriptions as well as their support necessary for this report.