Quarterly statistics on Community job vacancies

2007/0033(COD)

Article 10 of the Job Vacancy Statistics Regulation (Regulation (EC) No 453/2008) requires the Commission to report to the European Parliament and the Council on its implementation by 24 June 2010 and every three years thereafter. The report assesses the quality of the statistics provided by Member States and the quality of the European aggregates, and identifies potential areas for improvement.

This is the second report that the Commission submits to the European Parliament and to the Council. It draws upon experience accumulated through the quarterly data transmissions and documentation provided by the Member States in their annual quality reports.

The report’s main conclusions are as follows:

  • Much progress has been made in the past three years to implement job vacancy statistics (JVS) legislation and to build sound statistics in the field of job vacancies.
  • Country data have been transmitted in a timely manner and European aggregates have been published as scheduled. Timeliness improved further in 2011 when Eurostat started publishing flash estimates. The European aggregates published, for both the flash and final estimates, have been subject to only minor revisions.
  • Moreover, some of the countries that had previously produced more limited coverage of the economy have increased the scope of their JVS surveys in the recent past.
  • Nevertheless, incomplete coverage is still the main reason that JVS data are not used more widely. It is of the utmost importance that all Member States fully cover the public sector and small businesses in their quarterly estimates. The Commission will examine how to improve the situation in this regard, including the possibility of new legislative initiatives, with a view to ensuring the necessary improvements.