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Labour and Income, Social Statistics.Jesper Moltrup-Nielsen
+45 3917 3423
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The Implicit index of average earnings is a so-called unit value index, where wage trends are estimated on the basis of a simple salary average of all employees in the same industry. This means that wages partly reflect changes in staff composition in a given industry.
Private enterprises as well as ministries etc are the central users. The index is used especially in connection with various contract regulations, as well as the regulatory scheme in the public wageagreements.
The Implicit index of average earnings is the wage index that comes closest to being comparable to the European LCI.
User Needs
Multiple types of external users follow and use the two earnings indices, the standardised index of average earnings and the implicit index of average earnings. The biggest and most important users are organisations, ministries and government agencies, which use the indices to analyse trends, pressures on pay rates, international comparisons etc. In addition, the earnings indices are used for various contractual adjustments, including the escalator clause used for adjusting salaries in the public services. Other important users of the statistics are private enterprises, which use the earnings indices for contractual adjustments in particular. Furthermore, journalists also constitute and important user group.
User Satisfaction
Statistics Denmark continuously surveys the satisfaction of the main users in connection with the semi-annual contact committee meetings for earnings and absence statistics. Agenda, summary and documents from these meetings are available here. As of yet, there are no actual user satisfaction surveys for the standardised index of average earnings.
Data completeness rate
There are no specific EU regulations or other guidelines for compilation of the implicit index of average earnings. However, the statistics rest on the same data basis as that collected and used for the quarterly labour cost index, which is delivered to Eurostat each quarter. This implies that e.g. data is not collected from enterprises with less than 10 persons in employment, nor from the industry agriculture, forestry and fishing. In the same way as for the implicit index of average earnings, a few industries ±especially in the grouping into 36 industries ±are not published in Statbank Denmark for reasons of confidentiality. .