ESENER-PSR 2009 - European Agency for Safety and Health at Work

stage of sample preparations. An analysis of the LFS data shows that the availability and
quality of the data on the size of people’s workplaces varies across the countries:
For Ireland, Norway and Slovenia no information on the breakdown by size classes is
available from the LFS 2007. For these countries therefore data of preceding years (2005
for NO and SI, 2006 for IE) were used 17 .
In some countries (CH, DE, HR, FI, IE, NL, TR, UK) there are no cases in the category
"unknown > 10". In other countries quite high shares of employees can be found in this
category (LFS 2007: LU: 20%, EL: 24%, PT: 75%). The higher the share of missing
answers to this question is in a country, the more limited is the validity of the LFS data as
proxy for the statistical distribution of the universe.
In most countries, there are also some interviews for which no sector of activity is
attributed. The share of these interviews is however mostly negligible.
Another potential problem with the LFS data on the number of employees working in
establishments of certain categories is related to the type of employment: While certain types
of employees with non-standard employment contracts such as marginal part-timers, persons
in short-term temporary employment etc. are not always counted as employees by the firms
they are working at, they will probably characterize themselves as employees of that
establishment if asked for in a survey like the LFS. On the other hand, a big advantage of the
LFS data is that it covers civil servants as well as “normal”, dependent employees.
3.3 Principles applied for best estimates
This chapter describes the basic principles on which estimates on the statistical distribution of
employees and/or establishments were elaborated for countries in which reliable statistical
information on this was not available otherwise. The most important details of the estimates on
the level of the single countries are documented in chapter 5.
Estimates on the distribution of establishments respectively employees for countries in which
this information is available only on the level of the company
For the countries for which information on the distribution of organizations is available on base
of companies only, it is obvious that best estimates had to be elaborated since company and
establishment statistics differ significantly from each other (see chapter 1.2.3) regarding both
the absolute number of units and their relative distributions over the cells of the sampling
matrix. In the given situation there were basically two practicable ways on how to get to best
estimates regarding the distribution of establishments for countries where only the distribution
on company level is given:
17
The size of the establishment is a variable obviously asked not regularly in some countries but in
intervals only.
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