Labour Market Statistics: September 2017 quarter

#Period-specific information ##Response Rates Survey Reference period Response rate Achieved Sample rate HLFS Each week during the quarter (9 Jul 2017 – 7 Oct 2017) Target: 90 percent Achieved: 82.2 percent Target: 76 percent Achieved: 73.8 percent QES The pay week ending on, or before, 21 August 2017 Target: 89 percent Achieved: 89.0 percent N/A LCI Pay rates at 15 August 2017 Target: 94 percent Achieved: 96.07 percent N/A See New quality measures for the Household Labour Force Survey for more information on the sample rate and response rates. ##QES ###Care and support workers' pay equity settlement The Care and Support Workers (Pay Equity) Settlement Act 2017 came into effect on 1 July 2017. It mandated an increase in wages for those employed by aged and disability residential care and home and community support services throughout New Zealand. ##HLFS ###Outliers During the seasonal adjustment process, X-13-ARIMA-SEATS can give less weight to the irregular component. Specifically, if the estimated irregular component at a point in time is sufficiently large compared with the standard deviation of the irregular component as a whole, then the irregular component at that point can be downweighted or removed completely and re-estimated. We refer to such observations as partial- and zero-outliers, respectively. In practice, the downweighting of outliers does little to seasonally adjusted data, but the impact of the outliers on the trend series will generally be reduced. However, if an outlier ceases to be an outlier as more data becomes available, then significant revisions to the trend series become possible. The table below shows any partial (P) and zero (Z) outliers for the last year of each time series Outliers Quarters Male employed Female employed Male unemployed Female unemployed Male not in the labour force Female not in the labour force Dec 2016 Mar 2017 Z Z Jun 2017 Z P Z Sep 2017 ###HLFS pre- and post-calibration weight The following figure shows that while the distribution of the pre- and post-calibration weights differs within a quarter, the difference between the weights typically does not change from quarter to quarter. The undercoverage rate indicates how representative the pre-calibrated sample is. The higher the undercoverage rate, the less representative the pre-calibrated sample. Usually the undercoverage rate in the HLFS is around 20 percent. The overall undercoverage rate for the HLFS in the September 2017 quarter was 18.8 percent. This compares with 19.3 percent in the June 2017 quarter and 17.0 percent in the September 2016 quarter. ##General information and methodology For general information and methodology on the specific surveys within the labour market statistics release, please see the following Datainfo+ pages: Household Labour Force Survey Labour Cost Index Quarterly Employment Survey en-NZ