Statistics Finland

Social Statistics 

Työpajankatu 13, FI-00580 Helsinki

The Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) is a 4-yearly survey that provides EU-wide harmonised structural data on gross earnings, hours paid and annual days of paid holiday leave, which are collected under Council Regulation (EC) No 530/1999 concerning structural statistics on earnings and on labour costs, and Commission Regulation (EC) No 1738/2005 amending Regulation (EC) No 1916/2000 as regards the definition and transmission of information on the structure of earnings.

The Structure of Earnings Survey (SES) 2018 results are based upon approximately 1.3 million records covering most of the public sector and private enterprises with at least 10 employees.

Classifications used:

for economic activities: NACE Rev. 2

for occupation: ISCO 2008

for education: ISCED 2011

for regional breakdown: NUTS

Economic activities defined in sections B to S in classification NACE Rev 2.

As defined in the Council Regulation (EC) No 530/1999 concerning structural statistics on earnings and on labour costs and in the Commission Regulation (EC) No 1738/2005 amending Regulation (EC) No 1916/2000.

The statistical unit is local unit. 

The statistical population in SES 2018 refer to enterprises with at least 10 employees in the areas of economic activities defined by NACE Rev. 2 sections B to S.

Finland 

2018

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Data sources include several survey based data and register data.

The earnings data from private sector is collected by Finnish employer organisations (around 10 000 enterprises) and by Statistics Finland which conducts a sample survey (2 500 enterprises) among industries where unionization rate was under 70 percent at the given year. The private sector data is supplemented by Tax Authority’s dataset containing micro enterprises (n = 12 000). The data from the public sector is attained by Statistics Finland’s own data collection (local government sector) and from State Treasury (central government sector.) The Provincial Government of Åland collects data on the autonomous territory of the Åland Islands.

This database is supplemented with data from other registers. Data on characteristics of enterprise is obtained from Business Register. Information on a wage or salary earner’s education is obtained from Statistics Finland’s Register of Completed Education and Degrees, and information on an employee's local unit gathered from Employment statistics.

Annually

The statistics are based on sector-specific basic earnings data. The data from private sector is collected by Finnish employer organisations (10 000 enterprises) and by Statistics Finland which conducts a sample survey (1 800 enterprises) among industries where unionization rate was under 70 percent at the given year. The private sector data is supplemented by Tax Authority’s dataset containing micro enterprises (n = 12 000). The data from the public sector is attained by Statistics Finland’s own data collection (local government sector) and from State Treasury (central government sector.) The Provincial Government of Åland collects data on the autonomous territory of the Åland Islands.

The data on different sectors are combined into a single database and common earnings concepts and classifications are defined for all wage and salary earners irrespective of their collective agreement or form of remuneration. This database is supplemented with data from other registers. For example, information on a wage or salary earner’s education is obtained from Statistics Finland’s Register of Completed Education and Degrees, and information on an employee's local unit gathered from Employment statistics.

Data has been validated both on micro and macro level. Logical tests and inspections on yearly changes are carried out.

The public sector data are total data and are not adjusted for non-response. The private sector data are scaled to the level of the population using a survey frame formed from the Business Register. The estimator assigns more weight to observations from those enterprises whose stratum had the biggest non-response measured with number of employees. Estimation is performed so that the frame for unionised enterprises and the frame for non-unionised enterprises in the sample industries are estimated separately by stratum. The strata is formed according to the enterprises’ size category and industry. As the survey frame is sampled before the statistical reference time, a separate stratum is formed of the new enterprises with at least 5 employees which are added to the frame. The weighting coefficient of this stratum is 1.

The data on different sectors are combined into a single database and common earnings concepts and classifications are defined for all wage and salary earners irrespective of their collective agreement or form of remuneration.

The principles of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM principles) are employed by Statistics Finland as its overall framework for quality management. The quality management framework of the field of statistics is the European Statistics Code of Practice (CoP). The frameworks complement each other. The quality criteria of Official Statistics of Finland are also compatible with the European Statistics Code of Practice.

Quality management: https://www.stat.fi/org/periaatteet/laadunhallinta_en.html

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The results are used by the public, the media, researchers, and various organizations. The two former use Structure of Earnings Statistics through Statistics Finland’s databases or send specific questions directly to Statistics Finland. Their need consists of tabulations regarding the information on the earnings classified by economic activity, occupation, gender, region, and age.

Researchers and organizations are in demand of more detailed data. Researchers can obtain access (subject to a charge) to a database that contains harmonized time series of National Structure of Earnings Statistics. Organizations, such as employee or employer organizations, sometimes supplement their own earnings data by a more comprehensive view granted by the SES. Typically their needs relate to the distribution of earnings in Finland.  

The aforementioned users have been keen to utilize the SES data throughout the 2000s. Statistics Finland has not conducted surveys directly linking user satisfaction and the SES. However, according to surveys users hold Statistics Finland in high regard, and there have not been major issues regarding the quality of the SES.

The biggest problem that Statistics Finland and its users grapple with is the classification of occupations. Occasionally the classification defies the common sense applied by the users (certain idiosyncrasies of Finnish occupations) and leads to misguided presumptions.

Also, the concept of total earnings seems from time to time to be all too encompassing. Some users do not realize that it includes all the allowances and perks. On the other hand, bonuses and holiday pay, are assumed to be included (which they are not). However, according to our view, the use of total earnings is well reasoned, and this is again, a problem-related to communication with users, which Statistics Finland has duly acknowledged in its publications.

All the mandatory variables of the SES are considered to be used.  

Data submitted to Eurostat does not cover enterprises whose main activity belongs to the industries of agriculture, forestry, and fishery, private households employing domestic staff, or extraterritorial organizations and bodies. The data does not include conscripts.

All mandatory variables according to Commission Regulation (EC) No 1738/2005 are submitted to Eurostat.

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See below (6.2.1.)

Please refer to the attached document Coefficients of variation 2018. 

See further for details on the non-sampling errors.

The survey frame in the national SES data is drawn from the Business Register and it refers to the middle of the reference year. In the year 2018, the survey frame included 53 000 enterprises.

The base data for organized employers (captured by employer organizations) contain also earnings data from some enterprises that were not included or not synchronized in the original survey frame. Most of these respondents were either new or growing enterprises. These enterprises were considered as under the coverage of the frame if the number of employment captured from these employers met the level of the national survey frame, 5 employees. The data were added to the base data without any weighting, by using a coefficient of 1. In the public sector, the coverage was 100 percent so there was no need to do any adjustment for non-response.

Non-synchronization between the data and the survey frame may influence the quality of the statistics through data estimation. The data covers also those local units in activities defined in the regulation that does not belong to enterprises included in the survey frame (activity exclusion).

No specific measures for over coverage were conducted. The over coverage ratio was deemed insignificant.

No specific measures for common units -proportion were conducted. The administrative sources used have wide coverage and possible discrepancies were deemed insignificant. However, as synchronizing of the data in the registers is accomplished using enterprise and personal ID keys, some employees might remain unsynchronised due to data and timing differences.

The basic data for the Structure of Earnings statistics are obtained from different sources. The statistical reference month varies to some extent from September to December. The main body of data hails from September or October and thus the measurement error hailing from the inaccurate months is deemed to be negligible.   

The validity of the production process and the representativeness of the reference period have been ensured by comparing the SES -data (the gross monthly earnings for the reference month plus periodic bonuses for the year) to annual taxable gross earnings for the same persons in administrative data. For example, the annual taxable gross earnings for those in the same full-time employment for the full year were 0,6 percent lower compared to the calculated gross annual earnings based on SES. The reason for this is a consequence of the reference period. Earnings in October are a bit higher compared to earlier calendar months.

Data captured by Finnish employer organizations covered 84 percent of all organized enterprises with over 100 employment relationships. Enterprises smaller than 100 employees but larger than 5 employees the coverage was 56 percent. For unorganized enterprises (data collected by Statistics Finland) the coverage was about 7 percent of all enterprises in the population. The response rate to the survey collection was 77 percent of the 2500 enterprises in the sample.

The estimation weights have been calculated as an inverse of the realized sampling probability. The influence of unit non-response errors is being reduced by using itemized sampling strata by 59 activities and 4 classes by the number of employees. In the year 2018, the average coefficient for non-response in the private sector was 1.45 and in total data 1.28.

See 6.3.3.

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There has not been an overall measurement of the extent of processing errors. The quality of the national base data has been controlled during the whole data processing from the data capturing to publishing by branch-specific checking and validation rules. Observations not accepted by the national or Eurostat-validation process have been usually rejected. In general, their share has been somewhat insignificant.

Because the production process of national Structure of Earnings data has many processing steps and the base data has been captured mainly by Finnish employer organizations the imputation rates generally cannot be attained. However, we may indicate that the rates would be modest, due to the quality of the base data has been controlled during the data capturing and the production process.

Modeling is not used in SES 2018.

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The National SES of 2018 was first published in September 2019. The release was supplemented and made final by the section publication. This took place in March 2020. The first publication contained information regarding occupation, gender, and education. The second release added data on economic activity and region. The SES2018 for Eurostat was first delivered in June 2020, but due to errors, it was revised with the final data being sent in November 2020. 

9 months for the national SES

15 months for the national SES

Crucial data processing dates were:

• The national survey frame for private sector enterprises was created by September 2018 and after that, the data collection started for unorganized enterprises. Inquiry for the local government sector began in October 2018.
• The national Structure of Earnings data had been completed in March 2020, i.e. branch-specific survey data had been processed and harmonized into one single database.
• The data for senior management of private sector enterprises were created from administrative registers by the end of May 2020.
• The national Structure of Earnings data had been completed by data from administrative registers (annual earnings, months employed, unpaid absence, etc.) by the end of June 2020.
• The data for a sub-sample of 315 934 employees was delivered to Eurostat at the end of June 2020 and a final revised version at the beginning of November 2020.

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The definitions are applied according to the regulation.

Reference time: generally the data refer to the last quarter of 2018. Yet the reference period may slightly differ by sector and branch. In the service sector, the data refer to September. Data for manual workers in manufacturing depict the situation in the whole last quarter. Data for non-manual workers in manufacturing have been collected from September. In the central and local government sector, the data refer to October. 

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Comparability over time is sound. Differing from the SES2002, the SES2006 contained hourly earnings for teachers working for the local government and the local government sector wage and salary earners with reduced wages. In addition to these revisions also minor updates to production were made, namely regarding the method of calculating payments of shift work and adjustment for non-response.

SES2010 added to the coverage of employees for the first time data and earnings for air transport activities. SES2014 was produced akin to SES2010, however, there was a reduction of coverage regarding the shipping industry.  

SES 2018 was produced akin to SES2010.

See 8.2.

Finland compiles every year national Structure of Earnings Statistics. These statistics of 2018 formed the base for Eurostat’s Structure of Earnings Survey 2018. 

The national SES, which has been compiled since 1995, contained detailed information on roughly 1.34 million employment relationships in 2018. When the employment relationships are weighted to the level of the whole population of employees, they represent approximately 1.72 million employment relationships. In the fourth quarter of 2018, Finland had 2.2 million employment relationships according to the Labour Force Survey, thus National SES’s coverage was nearly 80 percent of the whole population. Basically, the national SES covers all the employment relationships but the employees employed by private sector enterprises with less than 5 employees.

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The following table presents a comparison between the Structure of Earnings and National Accounts by the NACE section in 2018. The figures of the SES are generally higher than of SNA. One of the factors is SNA's wider coverage of enterprises smaller than 5 employees, another factor relating to this, is different population groups, eg SNA includes conscripts (in sector O) whereas they could not be included in the SES. 

The gross annual earnings comparison between Structure of Earnings Statistics and National Accounts by NACE section in 2018, full and part time employees

Finnish Structure of Earnings Survey for 2018 is based on the national Structure of Earnings Statistics. The data delivered to Eurostat is a 25% random sample of employees and employers from the national earnings data. The data content of the Structure of Earnings Survey is according to the Council regulation and its amendments and it includes all the mandatory variables.

Some differences exist compared to the national SES. EU-SES18 is supplemented, in contrast to the national SES, with earnings data for private-sector enterprises’ senior management and air transport personnel derived from national tax registers. Also, to estimate variable B31 (number of weeks to which the gross annual earnings relate), various register-based variables originated from National Pensions Institute retained by Statistics Finland have been applied. The monthly and hourly earnings of national SES include payments in kind, which are not included in the earnings of EU-SES.

No national press releases.

The data of the Structure of Earnings statistics are published as a statistical release twice a year on Statistics Finland’s Internet page, https://tilastokeskus.fi/til/pra/index_en.html. In addition, tables in the StatFin online service are published from these statistics.

Online database can be found at http://www.stat.fi/til/pra/tau.html

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Microdata is available for researchers throughout the Statistics Finland Research Centre. Statistical legislation and data protection and confidentiality practices specified in legislation are applied in compiling and releasing the data. The data are subject to a charge.

The data is only disseminated via Statistics Finland's web page.

Methodological descriptions, concepts, definitions, and metadata are available on Statistics Finland’s web pages. These descriptions aim to be user-friendly and are not all comprehensive. Thus in addition Statistics Finland provides additional information when needed. 

National quality reports are produced yearly and are disseminated through Statistics Finland's webpages along with descriptions of the statistics and concepts used.

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The response burden of respondents for the wages and salaries sample survey is measured occasionally. This, however, covers only a small portion of the total response burden as most of the data is collected through Finnish employer organizations.

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No further comments.