Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the implementation of Regulation (EC) No 450/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council concerning the labour cost index (LCI)

Regulation (EC) No 450/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 February 2003 concerning the labour cost index (referred to here as the ‘LCI Regulation’) establishes a common framework for producing and transmitting comparable labour cost indices in the European Union. The Commission (Eurostat) publishes a quarterly news release on the hourly labour cost index. Complete data are available online, broken down by economic activity and labour cost components. In addition to the index figures, both quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth rates are published.

In July 2003, the Commission adopted Regulation (EC) No 1216/2003, setting out in greater detail the procedures for transmitting the index, the specific (seasonal) adjustments to be made and the content of the national quality reports. Then in March 2007, the Commission adopted Regulation (EC) No 224/2007. It amends Regulation (EC) No 1216/2003 and extends the scope of the labour cost index to cover the economic activities defined by NACE Rev.1, sections L, M, N and O. This extension means that non-market services, which account for the major share of these sections and which may have different dynamics from market services, are also covered. In August 2007, the Commission adopted Regulation (EC) No 973/ 2007. This amended a number of regulations on specific statistical domains, among them the Labour Cost Index, in order to implement the statistical classification of economic activities NACE Revision 2.

Pursuant to Article 13 of Regulation (EC) No 450/2003 the Commission must submit a report to the European Parliament and the Council every two years. The report should examine the quality of the LCI data in particular. The current report refers to the transmissions of LCI data from reference quarter 2010Q3 to quarter 2012Q2.

In Annex I of Regulation (EC) No 1216/2003, the quality of the labour cost index is defined in terms of the following dimensions: relevance, accuracy, timeliness and punctuality, accessibility and clarity, comparability, coherence and completeness.

As in the last reporting period, the level of accuracy, accessibility and clarity remains satisfactory. This report will therefore focus on improvements made concerning relevance and coverage and address the issues of coherence with national accounts data and comparability with respect to working-day adjusted data. Particular attention is paid to the problem of the punctuality of data transmissions, and the impact of late data transmissions on the quality of the published European aggregates.

EUR-Lex: COM(2013)69: Follow the progress of this report through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2013:069:FIN

---