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National reference metadata

Italy

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Labour costs survey - NACE Rev. 2 activity (lcs_r2)

National Reference Metadata in ESS Standard for Quality Reports Structure (ESQRS)

Compiling agency: Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT) Italian National Institute of Statistics Via Cesare Balbo, 16 - 00184 Rome - Italy  

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The LCS 2020 is based on the Council Regulation (EC) No 530/1999 concerning structural statistics on earnings and on labour costs and the Commission Regulation 1737/2005. It provides details on the level and structure of labour cost data, hours worked and hours paid.

The target population is composed by all the enterprises and institutions belonging to the Private and Public sectors with at least 10 employees in the NACE Rev. 2 sections B to S.

Since 2012 edition Italy has provided also data related to section O (even if the extension to this section is still considered optional).

Not Applicable

The variables provided are those required in the regulations according to the definitions stated there

The sampling unit is the Economic Unit that is the Enterprise for the private sector and the Institution for the public sector. The observation unit, the one used to build up the aggregate data, is the territorial unit defined as the portion of economic unit in a Nuts1 region within the Economic Unit

The population covered in the LCS as requested by Regulation refers to the Enterprises and Institutions belonging to the Private and Public sectors with at least 10 employees in the NACE Rev. 2 sections B to S including O. The frame list, derived from the Italian Business Register (ASIA) referred to 2020, is composed by about 187,313 enterprises representing 9,198,453 employees as regard private sector and 17,803 institutions with 3,382,124 employees as regard public sector.

Data are disseminated at national level and NUTS 1 level

Not Applicable

not provided

Not Applicable

At the end of the statistical process the RACLI register has also been used to reweight the sample. The calibration variables are the number of employees, the social security wage and the number of hours paid. This has allowed to calculate weights that produce estimates aligned with the final version of the register, while at the time of the sampling selection, only a provisional version of the RACLI register was available.

 

 

Since LCS 2012 edition, the use of statistical registers built upon administrative data has gradually increased.  The statistical processes for the Private and Public sectors are quite different. For the Private sector, data from a direct statistical survey was combined in all significant phases of the survey production process, with register data: the Annual Register of Individual Labour Costs (RACLI) data and the Business Register (ASIA) data. As for the public sector, data from the Labour Register (LR), from the Register of Public Institutions and data from administrative source have been used. In what follows, brief explanations of both are reported.

Registers and administrative data

The Labour Register is a statistical register containing information on employment and labour input, wages, contributions and income. It is the heart of labour statistics and its development in recent years has greatly enhanced the labour statistics either due to the production of output directly or by constituting a coordination framework able to provide much greater coherence to the entire system for labour statistics.

The setting up of such a register in Italy is extremely demanding as it is based on a plurality of administrative sources (see tables 3.1.1 and 3.1.2). The backbone of the system are the Social Security Institute (INPS) data and among them the UniEmens declarations. Moreover, the tax declarations, especially those submitted by the economic units for their workers (the new CU declarations) will be introduced both to guarantee a better coverage in term of units (e.g. is needed to ensure the coverage of not dependent jobs under an income threshold) and additional variables (e.g. those related to taxation and net income).

For the production of LCS 2020 two main registers (which can be viewed as subsets of the whole LR) have been used: for the private sector RACLI (which was also used for the 2016 edition of LCS) and for the public sector LR-public.

 

 Table 3.1.1. Main sources for RACLI register

Table 3.1.2. Main sources for LR-public register

 

The statistical process for the Private sector 

The survey for the private sector is a mixed register-sample survey process.

In fact, thanks to the availability of the RACLI register, LCS 2020 in the wake of what has already been done for the LCS 2016 an 2012 edition, has been designed introducing several solutions to allow a mutual integration between survey and register. In this approach, the register data assists the survey in some phases of the process, and the survey’s results can be used to check the register data and provide details not available in the Register.

The design of the process, therefore, had to take into account the timing of the availability of the register. Following the scheduled availability of Social Security data, the RACLI register is available as a provisional version in the autumn of year t+1 and, as a final version, in the spring of year t+2. So the provisional version was used for sampling, for prefilling the variables of the questionnaire and for checks during the data collection phase, while the final version was used for the post collection editing and imputation, including the imputation of non-responses, for calibration of the survey weights to known totals and for validation of the data. Moreover, the final data are used to evaluate comparatively the variables available in the register and those collected through the survey particularly to evaluate definitional issues.

This approach was guided, since LCS 2012 edition, by two main principles: the reduction in response burden: both the sample and the questionnaire were designed to obtain this objective, and the increase in the data quality, as it will be seen in the following paragraphs.

The frame list, derived from the Italian Business Register (ASIA) referred to 2020, is composed by 187,313 enterprises representing 9,198,453 employees. The final sample is composed by 24,521 enterprises.

The sampled enterprises had to provide data for the whole unit, through a web based questionnaire (CAWI) with some built in checks (first level checks). In a subsequent step the data are divided for each enterprise in the areas (NUTS1) in which the employees were localized with the help of information contained in the RACLI register. Thus the sampling unit is the enterprise and the observation unit (analysis unit) is the portion of enterprise comprised in one nuts1 area.

 

The statistical process for the Public sector

The statistical process of the public sector is entirely Register based. It is founded on two statistical registers, the Labour Register (LR) and the Register of Public Institutions and an administrative source, the Annual Account of the Ministry of Economy and Finance.

 

The frame list is derived from the institutions of the Register of Public institutions and the Labour Register. The final list is composed by 17,803 institutions with 3,382,124 employees.

 

Data sources

The statistical unit of the Labour Register is the job position, that is, for the employees, the employment relationship between an economic unit (the employer) and an individual (the worker) also identified by an activation date.

The LR for the public sector is fed by 5 main administrative sources: 1) the individual social contribution declarations that every month public institutions transmit to  INPS through the PosPa List section of the Uniemens (ex-Inpdap source); 2) the individual monthly payslips compiled by the NOIPA system of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) for the administrations that have joined the system (IGOP source); the contribution declarations that the economic units of the public sector transmit to the INPS through the section Lista Poslav of the Uniemens divided into those produced: 3) by the MEF Data Processing Centre, as a withholding agent, for employees, mainly temporary, of some ministries (source CedInps) and 4) from all other withholding agents of the public perimeter that for administrative reasons use the section Poslav List as private sector enterprises (source Private); 5) the yearly tax declarations  (source CU).

These sources, after data treatments aimed at eliminating duplications and harmonizing them, are integrated into a single database, with monthly information for each job position. In this phase an important role is played by the information taken from the Matrix of links between administrative units and institutional units produced within the operations for the Register of Public Institutions.

At this level the Register contains information on the characteristics of the job position (national collective agreement –NCA-, job title, type of working time, percentage of part-time, type of contract), on the labour input, measured as the average number of monthly positions, and the number of hours paid net of overtime. The number of overtime hours is estimated a) for the job positions covered by the IGOP source, using the wages for overtime hours, contained in this source, and the average hourly overtime rates from the collective agreements and the Annual Account and b) for the rest of the population of job positions with a massive imputation method that uses information from the Labour Force Survey.

The Annual Account is a takes-all survey carried out by the Ministry of Economics and Finance - General Accounting (RGS) to measure the personnel costs of public institutions. The data of the Annual Accounts, have been suitably studied, analyzed, and reclassified to produce data that fit the definitions of Labour Cost Survey regulation (Commission Implementing Regulation 1737/2005). Finally, for a very limited number of units the data were collected through the questionnaire built for the private sector. These are units that only recently passed from the population belonging to the private sector (as defined by the Business Register Asia) to the one belonging to the public sector and in particular in the list S13. These units are not yet covered by the Annual Account and are broadly similar, in many respects, to private sector units.

 

Data Processing

The data processing for the public sector consists in the construction of a takes-all database on public sector units with the variables required by the LCS regulation. The processing steps can be summarized as follows. First, LR data on labour inputs and paid hours, broken down by type of working time, and wages are aggregated by legal unit, NCA code, job title code. The second phase is to group from the Annual Account data on hours of absence, wages, contributions and other labour costs (according to the LCS classification) by institutional unit, NCA code, job title code. In the third stage, the information of this second database is used to impute the LCS missing variables in the first database, at legal unit, NCA code, job title code. In the fourth phase, the data are aggregated at the legal unit level and the classification variables, such as the economic activity and the territorial location, derived from the Register of Public Institutions and the Matrix of links between administrative units and institutional units, are added to the data. At this stage, in relation to the Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), Educational and Training Institutions are classified in Section P of the NACE  (Education), while the rest of the Ministry is classified in Section O (Public Administration and Defence; Compulsory Social Insurance). In the last step, the data is subject to editing and imputation procedures that adopt the same techniques and software used for private sector data.

Not Applicable

The data appeared for the first time on Eurostat database on December 1st 2022. Thus the length of time between the end of the reference year (2020) and the first publication of data is of 23 months.

The LCS 2020 complies with the standard set up on the Council Regulation (EC) No 530/1999 concerning structural statistics on earnings and on labour costs and with the definitions of variables adopted in the Commission Regulation 1737/2005.

The LCS 2020 is broadly comparable with the previous edition of LCS (2016) for what concerns the main aggregates. The main, methodological and technical aspects have not been changed, nevertheless some indicators must be compared with a particular caution considering the events characterizing labour market in the pandemic year. Furthermore, some choices of the E&I and estimation have been made to allow a better mutual integration between survey data and administrative   . For these reasons some indicators may have problems of comparability (like hourly indicators, hours per capita.) due to differences in measuring variables between register and survey (for example for the variables “hours paid” and “hours worked”). Another area in which there might be problems of   comparability is the public sector: as for the LCS 2016 edition the entire process is based on administrative data, but in this edition the sources used are partially different from the previous edition. Moreover some parameters used for the estimation of not available variables have been revised compared to the previous edition. Furthermore as regard sector P, some methodological changes caused the increasing of the estimation of hours worked. In the LCS 2020 edition, in fact, the process improves the estimation hours worked of Education sector by adding the hours of not frontal teaching to the contractual hours, and using a new method of estimating overtime hours.