Timeliness and punctuality
Contact info
Employment, Labour Market, Social StatisticsMichèle Naur
+45 3917 3414
Get as PDF
The annual and quarterly working time accounts before the 2016 revision (Discontinued)
Working hours are regularly published in accordance with Statistics Denmark's benchmark goals.
For quarterly statistics concerned, this goal implies that the publications to be released at the latest by the end of the following quarter. For the sake of short-term business regulation (STS), this implies that the WTA to be published typically by the middle of the last month of the following quarter. (The requirement for most employment series for STS is 2 months and 15 days). For annual statistics concerned, this implies that publications to be released at the latest by the end of the following year. In the interest of national accounts the annual WTA will be published in June with provisional figures for the previous year. This makes the annually WTA for the year t to be published in the same month as the publication of the quarterly WTA for the period 1 quarter t +1.
The transition to the new WTA resulted, however, that annual WTA 2011, based on the new eIncome sources, were not published until December 2012, whereas the publication of the quarterly statistics has not given rise to any delay.
Timeliness and time lag - final results
The Working Time Accounts are published once a year with annual figures, and four times a year with quarterly figures. The first publication of annual data covering the period 1995-1998* was on November 30th 1999.
The present publication of the WTA statistics is published on the basis of eIncome statistics. Release time for the annual statistics is the reference year + 6 months. The latest year are preliminary figures calculated on the basis of the quarterly accounts. Release time for the quarterly statistics is the reference quarter +2 months and 15 days.
The statistics are available both in a preliminary version and the final version, so WTA for the last two quarters will be reviewed at each quarterly statement of the WTA. New knowledge or time for thorough debugging can cause changes in the other quarters which do not affect the annual working time account. When new structural data (RAS, ERE-statistics and the structural statistics on earnings) are incorporated in connection with the calculation of the annual WTA, the levels from the latest year where structural data is available and throughout the projection period is revised. When the data structure is incorporated, data up to and including the last year with structural data is considered to be final in the Working Time Account.
The time series covers the period:
- Q1 2008 - Q4 2014 in the quarterly WTA, published March 13, 2015, and
- 2008-2013 in the annual WTA with the release on 20 June 2014.
Punctuality
For the quarterly Working Time Account 87.5 percent (7 out of 8 publications ) is published exactly as planned or ahead of schedule . One releases (third quarter 2013) did not comply with the pre-announced period, as the data quality was found too poor, and therefore the release was delayed for three days.
The annual WTA has been published three times on the basis of eIncome input data (since December 2012), and all the pre-announced publication dates were met (100 per cent).
Data to Eurostat short term business statistics (STS ) are evaluated against the requirements for quarterly interim STS data (a deadline within 2 months after the reference quarter) and here 71.4 per cent of the releases met the requirements (5 out of 7 were released as scheduled) .
For the final STS quarterly data 87.5 per cent (7 out of 8 of the releases) were transmitted according to the required deadline (within 2.5 months after the reference quarter).