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

The LFS data were however not used 1:1 as basis for the estimates. An analysis of the
available data (e.g. comparison of LFS data on the distribution of employees with register
based data on the distribution of employees shows that the LFS generally tends to
overestimate the number of establishments to a certain degree. This holds especially for the
smaller units with 10 to 19 and 20 to 49 employees. One of the reasons for this phenomenon
is maybe the definition of establishment as “place where you worked” (see chapter 3.2) in the
LFS questionnaire. Some respondents might have referred their answer to a smaller unit than
the establishment in the sense defined for the survey. In consequence, in the estimates made
for the ESENER 2009, we therefore slightly reduced the number of employees in these two
size-classes. This brought the LFS figures more in line with available official statistics on the
distribution of employees on establishments.
Estimates made to improve weaknesses of the provided establishment level statistics
In countries where the required statistics were available for establishments, but showed very
clear weaknesses regarding any of the cells of the matrix, the LFS data were also used for an
improvement of the statistical base for the sectors in which deficiencies were identified. This
type of correction was mostly limited to countries with deficiencies in the sector “Public
Services”.
In all countries where reliable statistics on the distribution of establishments over the various
cells of the sampling matrix were available, but no information on the distribution of employees
(e.g. the Netherlands), estimates for the employee proportional statistics were calculated on
base of the official data for the distribution of establishments and not – as in the countries
where establishment level statistics were totally lacking - on base of the LFS.
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